Falling Off the Map (2 page)

Yet loneliness cuts in both directions, and there are 101 kinds of solitude. There is the loneliness of the sociopath and the loneliness of the only child, the loneliness of the hermit and the loneliness of the widow. And as with people, so too with nations. Some are born to isolation, some have isolation thrust upon them. Each makes its own accommodation with wistfulness and eccentricity and simple, institutionalized standoffishness. Australia, a part of the Wild West set down in the middle of the East, hardly seems to notice, or to care, that it is a Lonely Place; Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to be assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

Yet all Lonely Places have something in common, if only the fact that all are marching to the beat of a different satellite drummer. And many are so far from the music of the world that they do not realize how distant they are. Both South Korea and North are zany, lonely places in their way: the difference is that North Korea is so cut off from the world that it does not know
how strange it is and cannot imagine anything except North Korea. This is how life is, I imagine North Koreans thinking: being woken up each morning with loudspeaker exhortations in the bedroom; being told exactly what clothes to wear and which route to take to work; being reminded each day that Kim Il Sung is revered around the world. In the half-unnatural state of solitary confinement, Lonely Places develop tics and manias and heresies. They pine, they brood, they molder. They gather dust and data, and keep their blinds drawn round the clock. In time, their loneliness makes them stranger, and their strangeness makes them lonelier. And before long, they have come to resemble the woman with a hundred cats in a house she’s never cleaned, or the man who obsessively counts the names in the telephone book each night. They grow three-inch nails, and never wash, and talk with the artificial loudness of someone always talking to himself.

Burma, out of the blue, decides to call itself Myanmar and to name its most famous city, unintelligibly, Yangon. Iceland speaks a tongue that Grendel would have recognized. North Korea, which sees no tourists, is building the largest tourist hotel in the world, 105 stories high. And for many years now in Havana, across the street from the U.S. Interests Section, there has stood a huge billboard, with a caricature of a “Ggrrrr”-breathing Uncle Sam, next to the message
SEÑOR IMPERIALISTS! WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FEAR OF YOU
! There are more things on earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

When people think of Lonely Places, they tend to think of moody outcrops off the coast of Scotland, or washed-up atolls adrift in the Pacific. They may even think of the place where I am writing this, a silent hermitage above the sea along the unpeopled coast of northern California. But Lonely Places are not just isolated places, for loneliness is a state of mind. The
hut where I am sitting now is utterly alone. For days on end, I do not hear a single voice; and from where I write, I cannot see a trace of human habitation. Yet in a deeper sense, the place is packed. I am companioned—by rabbits, stars, and wisps of cloud—in worlds far richer than any capital. The air is charged with presences, and every inch of hillside stirs. I watch for the skittering of a fox on my terrace, listen to the crickets chattering in the dusk, catch a blue jay’s wings against the light. Birds sing throughout the day, and the ocean’s colors shift. Everything is a jubilee of blue and gold, and at night, walking along the hills, I feel as if I am walking towards a starlit Temple of Apollo. A Lonely Place in principle, perhaps, but certainly not in spirit.

More than in space, then, it is in time that Lonely Places are often exiled, and it is their very remoteness from the present tense that gives them their air of haunted glamour. The door slams shut behind them, and they are alone with cobwebs and yellowed snapshots, scraps of old bread and framed photographs of themselves when young. The beauty (and pathos) of Burma today derives from the fact that it is stranded amidst decaying remnants of its former glory, and the poignancy of Cuba that in the midst of leafy university quadrangles, you will find bird-spotted tanks. You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, “We have now landed in Lonely Place’s Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is … frozen.”

Yet Lonely Places are generally sure that their time is about to come. North Korea is just waiting for Stalinism to sweep the world and the Olympics to be held in the stadia it has built for them (the secret of his longevity, says Kim Il Sung, the world’s longest-running dictator, is his optimism); Argentina is just waiting for the day when it will be a world power again, the cynosure of every distant eye. Lonely Places have seen Bulgaria,
China, even Albania admitted, or awakened, to the world; they have seen the Falklands, Grenada, even Kuwait enjoy their moments in the spotlight. They tell themselves that even Japan was once a “double-bolted land,” as Melville put it, and China, and Korea too; they tell themselves that tomorrow will bring yesterday once more.

Lonely Places are often poor places, because poverty breeds wonkiness and a greater ability to visualize than to realize dreams. Lonely Places are often small countries, because smallness gets forgotten: the tiny voices of Tibet, or Benin, or East Timor are seldom heard at international gatherings. But even huge countries can be Lonely Places, or have Lonely Places inside them, as anyone who has been to Siberia or Ladakh, Kashgar or Wyoming, can attest. Everywhere, in some lights, is a Lonely Place, just as everyone, at moments, is a solitary. Everyone sometimes dances madly when alone, or thumbs through secrets in a drawer. Everyone, at some times, is a continent of one.

Lonely Places are defined, in fact, by their relation to the things they miss. You would expect the western fjords of Iceland, or the depths of Tierra del Fuego, to be lonely; but there is a more unanswerable kind of loneliness, and restlessness, in Reykjavik and Buenos Aires, the loneliness of people just close enough to the world to see what they might be. Both American Samoa and Western Samoa are pretty little South Sea bubbles a world away from anywhere, and both are isolated hideaways lost in their own surf-soft universe. Both are graced by palm-fringed beaches, Technicolor cricket games, and huts echoing with cries of “Bingo” in the dark. But what makes American Samoa a Lonely Place is that it also has a zip code, a Radio Shack, and a Democratic caucus. It has American-style license plates, yellow school buses, and
Days of Our Lives.
It sends a congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to vote.

Other Lonely Places are happy in their loneliness, or able, at least, to turn it to advantage. The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of “No worries, mate,” while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point. Others, like Tibetans, pine for a loneliness that is tantamount to peace. Still others have the bitterness of outcasts: if they cannot play the game, say the Libyans, why should you? “Ye Visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places!” sang Wordsworth, who found all his solace and scripture in his loneliness, and saw in it purity and a return to buried-over divinity. Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed. Everyone longs at times to get away from it all. Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves. Romantic when first I visited Iceland, I found in it a province of romance; returning, four years later, in a darker mood, I saw in it only shades of winter dark. The Gobi Desert, for a couple in love, is as far from loneliness as Hong Kong, for a single traveler, may be close. Even a jam-packed football stadium may be lonely for the referee. It is common these days to hear that as the world shrinks, and as more and more places are pulled into the MTV and CNN circuit, loneliness itself may become extinct. Certainly, many Lonely Places—Vietnam and Cuba, for two—grow less remote with every joint-venture hotel, and cities like Toronto and Sydney, London and L.A., already seem part of some global Eurasamerican village, with a common language and video culture. Yet the very process of feverish cross-communication that is turning the world into a single polyglot multiculture is producing new kinds of Lonely
Places as fast as it eliminates the old. The lingua franca of parts of American Samoa is Mandarin, and Farsi is the second language of Beverly Hills. Japanese Joãos are returning to their grandfathers’ homes from São Paulo as fast as German Hanses are taking Michikos back to Buenos Aires. Reykjavik is loneliest of all, I suspect, for the Thai girls who sit in the Siam Restaurant (on Skolavördustigur), alone with their mail order husbands. And even as the world contracts and isolation fades, half the countries around the globe are still off the map in some sense, out of sight, out of mind, out of time. There will never be a shortage of Lonely Places, any more than there will ever be of lonely people.

Lonely Places, then, are the places that are not on international wavelengths, do not know how to carry themselves, are lost when it comes to visitors. They are shy, defensive, curious places; places that do not know how they are supposed to behave. Yemen, Brunei, and Mali are Lonely Places; Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell are too. Desolation Isle is a Lonely Place, and Suriname, and California as seen by the Hmong. So, too, is the room next door.

We were standing in front of the Tower of the Juche Idea, a 450-foot granite column, seventy tiers high, topped by a 60-foot torch, and symbolic of North Korean President Kim Il Sung’s seminal notion of
Juche
(or self-reliance, as you and I and Emerson call it). “The Juche idea means that we should believe in our own strength, we are the masters of our destiny,” my guide was telling me, choosing to ignore, for the moment, his country’s patrons in Moscow and Beijing. “Even the South Koreans love our president Kim Il Sung,” he continued, naming his country’s most fervent enemies. “They know he is a great man.” Around the base of the monument were “relievos” of the Kimilsungia flower, and a 50-foot-wide “hymn to President Kim Il Sung.” At its foot were 230 congratulatory plaques, from Dar es Salaam, Finland, Zimbabwe, Lima, Gambia, and France. “Long live Kim Il Sungism!” offered the greetings from the New York Group for the Study of Kim Il Sungism.

It had seemed, at the time, a good idea, this holiday in Pyongyang. It was an unusual place, I suspected, somewhat off the tourist trail, stable (same leader for forty-five years), and quiet. It certainly had a distinctive culture—the tourist brochures featured “slogan-bearing trees” and offers of a thirty-seven day “Mud Treatment Tour”; the magazines talked of
movies like
The Report of No. 36
and
Order No. 027
, reproduced a painting by a ten-year-old prodigy (
An Athletic Meeting of Crabs
), even extolled the possibilities for athletics (“Swinging and seesawing are popular among women”). The North Korean system of dance notation was, I had read, “recognized by the art circle of the world as the most precious cultural treasure of the contemporary times.” And at one hundred dollars a day, guide and driver and hotel and meals included, it was, according to the
Condé Nast Traveler
Index, one of the cheapest vacation spots in the world. Besides, the North Koreans were nothing if not welcoming. “Golfers, come to Korea!” sang the pamphlets in their embassy in Beijing. “Honeymoon in Korea.” Even “Animals and Plants Invite Tourists to Korea.”

It had not, it was true, been easy to find the four-story brick embassy. The guide in my Beijing hotel listed the twenty-five most important foreign legations in the city, but its ally’s was not among them. No flag fluttered above the building’s entrance, and no sign in English identified its allegiances. Shrewdly, however, I deduced its identity from the fourteen pictures of Kim Il Sung displayed on the billboard outside. Inside, at eleven-thirty on a weekday morning, the embassy had the feel of an evacuated palace: red-carpet staircases sweeping into emptiness, long, unlit corridors heavy with dust. Then a round man appeared, speaking some English: “What do you want?” I told him. “Ha! How long will you stay?” I told him. “Ha! Where are you staying in Beijing?” I told him. “Ha!” That, apparently, marked the end of immigration formalities; he gave me a short form asking me to list “Mork undertaken,” divested me of five dollars (one can buy fourteen North Korean visas for the same price as a single tourist visa to China), and told me to come back the following week to collect a visa, a voucher, and a ticket to paradise.

Chosonminhang Flight 162 from Beijing to Pyongyang was
not lavishly decorated; its only appurtenance was a brown paper bag in every seat pocket, saying “For your refuses.” As soon as the plane took off, however, martial music struck up, the stewardesses began distributing bottles of Pyongyang Lager, and everyone was handed some in-flight reading. It was easy to spot the North Korean passengers: they were the ones with Kim Il Sung badges pinned to their hearts, who were ignoring the in-flight literature. It was easy to spot the Japanese businessmen: they were the ones politely paging through a magazine that told them, “The heinous Japanese marauders will be forced out. And the star will be brighter over our land.”

Such lyrical effusions apart, the magazine gave a very clear account of the land we were going to visit. It included pictures of machines and generator rooms, quotes from the Great Leader (helpfully printed in bold type), and—more promising still—photographs of a “Happiness-Filled Pleasure Park” (“Mad mouse makes you rhythmical and buoyant,” advised the caption). It told of a film director’s agony as he realized that “my literary inspiration and spirit, knowledge and power of the pen seemed to be too poor or weak to represent the greatness of Comrade Kim Il Sung.” Frankly, I could understand his problem: the Great Leader was a “great comrade, great man and fighter,” I read on one page, “a great thinker, politician and strategist … a great man and father of the people.”