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
