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Sunday, January 15, 2023

Unit 1.7 Why We Travel Extract 07

 

Extract No. 07

SOURCE: SCERT UPDATED QUESTION BANK 


Page No. 70  [Line, “Travel, then ………………… never really end”]

Read the extract and do all the activities that follow.


       Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is - and has to be - an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “travelling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”

       So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also - Emerson and Thoreau remind us-have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

       And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sacks’ “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

       So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humour.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.



A1. True or false :                  (02)


State whether the following statements are true or false.



a) Emerson and Thoreau insisted that reality is our creation. (T)


b) Travel is a way to keep our minds mobile and awake. (T)


c) While travelling, we are not receptive and mindful. (F)


d) We are ready to get transformed when we are on a voyage. (T)

A2.    Find out :                              (02)

          Write down the views expressed by the great travel writers Emerson and Thoreau


. Emerson advised that travelling is a fool’s paradise whereas Thoreau believed that who travelled a good deal of concord. Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as we do the books that we reads. We find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find out.


A3.    Give reasons :                    (02)

          The writer has compared travel with love because ...........……………….


This is a Practice Activity 


A4.    Personal Response :          (02)

          Do you like adventures like Trekking, voyaging to unknown places? Share your views in fifty words.


(This is a Practice Activity.


A5.    Language study :               (02)


a)       We invent the places.

          (Rewrite the sentence into Present perfect Tense)


          We have invented the places.


b)       The most valuable pacifies we explore will always be the vast expanses within us.

          (change the degree)


          P.D.  :  No other pacifies we explore will always be as valuable as the vast expanses within us.


          C.D. : The vast expanses within us will be more valuable than any other valuable pacifies.


A6. Vocabulary :                          (02)

          Find out words from the extract which mean the following.

a)       A person with exceptional qualities or abilities = Prodigies

b)       Doorstep = Thresholds

c)       Goodness = Virtue

d)       Abstract theory with no basis in reality = Metaphysical

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