Horizons of the World

Je suis hanté. L’Azur ! L’Azur ! L’Azur ! L’Azur!
— Stéphane Mallarmé

A certain essence of traveling is commonly said to be the thirst for new horizons. For some people, however, it is literally – or rather, physically – a question of a search for the most striking ones. But where? Which ones? Which kind of horizons really moves their very ethereal core?

For the majority of the persons who feel such an insistent if not overwhelming urge, it is probably a question of a diffuse and unconscious impulse, but one far beyond the curiosity of the average tourist or even traveler. We are dealing with an obsessive concern.

Certain people’s material imagination is, as Gaston Bachelard indicates (1), strongly related to a few basic elements – in this case air and space – and therefore horizons in general, and particular ones especially activating such an intense although mute imagination.

For them, the way is practically fused with the goal, through the profound concentrations of openness.

They are naturally and irresistibly attracted by seasides and coasts, even if they of course are also seduced by expansions of the kind experienced in mountainous or wide desert areas as well as other places imbued with such a wide openness.

They want absolute horizons, and therefore in clear, sunny weather.

For them, the deeper the horizon, the better. In fact the mere knowledge of, for example, the existence of land even many miles away when experiencing a coast, forms a mental obstacle in the irresistible avidity for the depth awakened by a horizon.

For them, the ample drift of the spacial imagination isn’t enough. The mind subjected to it feels a compulsory movement to fly away, and experience the evoked distant geographic regions. Also central here are the more or less diffuse relations between certain geographic areas, borders and other similar artificial concepts being utterly irrelevant. These relations can be very vague or even impossible to define for them. Still, strongly and intuitively felt as if magnetically.

For them, in fact, it is not the horizon as such that is at the center of their fascination and obsession. Rather, what it activates, the contrast between near elements and what is insinuated, above and beyond, is that empty and still highly vivid, inviting open space, calling the mind to a movement further away but still anchored in and related with the local environment, strengthening the perception, the mental suction of the distant, invisibly but strongly sensed presence. Thus also the importance of the geographic knowledge in question and its influence on the experiencing of a certain place in relation to the activated connections and that beyond.

Thus for them, the blue silhouette of distant mountains or the tops of voluminous cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds serve as natural thresholds for their imaginary but sensuous flight through the specific sky of the place and the moment, for they are sensing, almost grasping far away places if not even continents, mentally almost shortcircuiting distances…

For them therefore the real voyage to experience such central places always remains a vivid temptation (2).

For them, leaving such places especially in the evening is sad when not anxious.

But for them, to close this reflection, this natural mental thirst tends to extinguish following sunset: West, and more especially the course of the sun, is the magnet that attracts the very mineral of their mind. Therefore their relative lack of passion or interest for the geographical East and its dawn.

(1) See in this case Gaston Bachelard’s Air and Dreams from 1943.
(2) In my case not the least pairs of seemingly complementary shores such as, also due to historical/cultural bounds, the atlantic coast of the Gulf of Cádiz in southwest Spain and the eastern coast of the Veracruz state by the Gulf of Mexico. Another, powerfully attractive to me since childhood and a central area that I unfortunately only have seen from altitude, is the eastern coast of Florida with its Keys and its Everglades.