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Mar. 5--The best art, James Salter suggests in There & Then, teaches one how to live.
Travel writing often does something smaller, teaching one where to stay and, perhaps, what to eat. But the best travel writing, in a modest way, also teaches one how to live.
Most of the 19 pieces collected in There & Then originally appeared in magazines such as Esquire, Outside and European Travel and Life between 1977 and 2003. Some are dated; most are not.
In Europe, Salter writes, "The shadow of history falls upon you and, knowing none of it, you realize suddenly how small you are. To know nothing is to have done nothing. To remember only yourself is like worshipping a dust mote. Europe is on the order of an immense, an unfathomable class, beyond catalogue or description."
Salter muses on mortality -- and immortality -- in the essay Cemeteries. He describes Victor Hugo as "a born writer, poetic, exact" and could just as well be describing his own writing, were such immodesty not unseemly.
Salter describes living in an unheated house in the south of France, the sheets "so cold we could not turn over in bed: We lay like statues of saints, rigid arms crossed."
Later in the same essay, he describes an amorous encounter: "We hardly knew one another, but she touched me as one touches a nervous horse. Don't worry, it said. She smiled. Days without name, without number . . ."
For Salter, the act of travel is the act of making memories, of "burning the days," as he puts it in his memoir of the same name.
"I gave, over the years, a lot to skiing," he writes in the essay The Skiing Life, "by which I mean time and certain broken bones. The bones have healed -- I can't even say which shoulder or leg it was -- and the time was not wasted. I say that because so much of it is remembered and what is truly wasted is time you have nothing to show for and cannot recall."
Always, Salter's travel is framed by the passage of time, by the change of seasons, by the slow aging of a young fighter pilot into a writer.
The Paris of his youth offered "more than a hint of another life, free of familiar inhibitions, a sacred life, this great museum and pleasure garden evolved for you alone."
And yet, for the older, wiser Salter, Paris is, "in the deepest sense,...closed to the foreigner."
Evening in Basel is a short piece on a short flirtation with an older woman, in which Salter insists:
"The thing that finally makes a woman irresistible, of course, is what she says and what she does not. You may doubt this, but in the long run it is true. Looks, fine legs, these are things you can find in the street, but listening to an intelligent voice talking of things lived and seen -- to feel the experience in it and, for want of a better word, the gallantry -- there are not many things in life more seductive."
Salter climbed mountains and skied them. He saw the whole of Europe and lived there for months at a time. He traveled, he confides, for "architecture and good food."
But there is more to these essays. A kind of holiness permeates them, a sense of the sacred -- a sense of grandeur, a celebration of life well-lived.
Sleeping below the summit of a mountain soon to be climbed, Salter writes, "The rest is silence, stars, and the promise of triumph when day comes, a triumph more pure, more imperishable, more meaningless than almost anything else."
Bill Eichenberger is Dispatch book critic. beichenberger@dispatch.com
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