Journeying to people instead of places is the reverse of the current, holiday-bound view on travels. Indeed, the projected picturesque of the surprising landscapes is the main constituent mesmerizing people into moving at great distances, sometimes despite the difficulties of the voyage, that finally become themselves part of the picturesque. They mark breaks in the ordinary life, places of election in the inner map of memories. Yet more and more people travel nowadays out of the holiday framework of simply and essentially changing the landscape. Business travel abroad is still a journey? What kind of travel is the one that has not the end in itself, neglecting the fascination of the journey in favor of the usefulness of the trip? Sometimes individuals fly thousands of kilometers, change cars and hotels, in a closed circuit blind to the landscape, in order to participate in a few-hours business or scientific session, and then go back, packed in their own atmosphere, not tainted by foreign interference. In their turn, the interferences tend to be so minimized in the global society, that sometimes Asia seems undistinguishable from Europe, especially when it comes to the closed circuit of urban agglomerations and specialized, professional environments.Such a stance on travels is witnessed long ago in Mircea Eliade's journals. Although he traveled everywhere across the world, from Europe to Japan, from India to America, his travel notes contain only few remarks on the various landscapes he has seen. On the contrary, he practically registered every people he met, particularly the professionals he intentionally met with, talking philosophy, religion, anthropology. His journals look like the ball agenda of a young lady of the yore, filled with the famous names he danced with, but no mention of the music. Places and landscapes are only sketched, whereas people are minutely portrayed, and substantially enriched with events, ideas, talks and, more than everything else, the author's enthusiasm. It is not only that Eliade practically met only people and rarely places, but it appears that he usually met just a kind of people, namely intellectuals, professionals, those whose books he read and those who read his books. He was eager to meet them because it seems that he felt the need to inhale a certain cultural atmosphere that the books were not satisfying, but propelled instead. It appears that he lived in a kind of world of knowledge that stretched the boundaries of the world proper.Similarly to Eliade's attitude on travelling to people, the contemporary trips to events reflect a major change in perceiving and representing both the world and the journeys. It delineates a smaller, concentrated and more homogenous sphere of an essentially human constituency rather distant from both the attraction of the picturesque and the living of a substantial difference through a breaking of the ordinary course of life.
by Erwin Kessler
