O vast Rondure, swimming in space,
Cover’d all over with visible power and beauty,
Alternate light and day and the teeming spiritual darkness,
Unspeakable high processions of sun and moon and countless stars above,
Below, the manifold grass and waters, animals, mountains, trees,
With inscrutable purpose, some hidden prophetic intention,
Now first it seems my thought begins to span thee…
…The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the
Arabs, Portuguese,
The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor,
Doubts to be solv’d, the map incognita, blanks to be fill’d,
The foot of man unstay’d, the hands never at rest,
Thyself O soul that will not brook a challenge.
—Walt Whitman, Blades of Grass, Book XXVI
How different is the voyage of the modern “explorer!” As I write this on my laptop computer, I sit in a plush terrycloth bathrobe on a comfortable bed in an air-conditioned stateroom, while the roll-stabilized mighty ship cuts through the monsoon-stirred waters at 20 knots with barely a creak. I bemoan that the ship’s rolling and pitching made it difficult for me to run on the treadmill in the workout room while I watched videos of a trail in the woods by Lake Tahoe. I didn’t let rough seas spoil today’s lectures on Mumbai and on Buddhism, or my creative writing class, or the group trivia contest (we won again!), or my meals in the ship’s restaurant.
Even here in the middle of the Arabian Sea, our floating city carries the blight of light pollution with it. Whitman’s “unspeakable high processions” of countless stars are hidden by our inability to escape the ship’s lights and thus dark-adapt our eyes to the night sky. So we must rely on a shipboard planetarium to see artificial representations of the stars right above our heads.
And yet I hold that this still merits being called exploration.
Each of us on the ship is a seeker who searches for broader knowledge of the geography, history, and cultures of the world and our own personal place in relation to the the tale of mankind and our universe.
Each of us understands that we come from a place of high privilege that we are able to undertake such a quest strictly at our leisure and for our own education. We are not at sea because we are indentured servants, or fighting for our countries in a war, or driven by finding a way of facilitating our nation’s trade. We are here because it matters deeply to us in some other way that we may only dimly be aware of.
Even to experience some of these ports of call for a few hours is a blessing. It may seem a sin that we don’t have more time to visit cities so rich with history that even a lifetime lived there would not be enough.
But we’ve been there. We’ve seen them with our own eyes.
I see the dust of Delphi and the Acropolis and Old Jerusalem and the Pyramids and Petra on my hiking shoes.
That dust may wash off in the monsoon rains at Mumbai on Thursday. But nothing will wash away my ability to say that I’ve trod those paths.
So I unapologetically say I’m an explorer. Even if I only say it to myself.