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Lima, Peru
12° 3' S 77° 3' W
Jan 05, 2006 21:26
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Addendum to Lima

Text written in: English

Noah I think did not enjoy his stay in Lima, and although I enjoyed it more because of my familial connections, I could not help but agree with him that the city was not great for backpackers.

Except for one thing, part of being a backpacker is meeting new folks, talking about different cultures, etc, etc... and Lima is a city which kept us sort of locked into our hostel (the point in Barranco) and chatting with different backpackers almost all the time. Although everyone there was so eager to chat it was almost annoying, I was glad for it as I began to realize that all backpackers are not the same. When I went on this trip at first I expected to only meet  highly educated, fairly wealthy, and intelligent people. In the least, most backpackers are fairly intelligent and almost as many are educated, but wealthy was a big mistake. At the point I met people who were coal miners, steel weilders, tree planters, and workers in saw mills, the only thing I think we all had in common was the fact that we all saw some value in travelling. The value in fact was greatly varied as I met one australian woman who kept talking about all the cocaine in Peru at the same place on the same day that I met a Dutch scientest studying crusteceans off the coast of central Peru. So we aren't all the same and neither really is our desire to travel, which leads me thankfully to the ostensible purpose of the whole journal. Why do people travel, what is it that they want and they think they will get out of whatever it is they are looking for?

 

I can start the answer to the question with a description of  my favorite acquatence from Lima. A guy named Jocham from the netherlands, who was about 6'6 with huge facial features, long blond hair and a voice like andre the giant . This man was extremely amiable, confident, interesting, and incredibly goofy. When we chatted he talked a lot about meeting women, about how he really enjoyed travelling, about his possible career options, and about how travelling helped him become more confident (even though he was still insecure about the fact that he had to wear glasses), and as a result of the entire conversation I realized that I had absolutely no clue what this guy wanted. He talked about so many different things, and then admitted his own confusion, that I was reduced to a point where I could never begin to speak in generalities about this man, so as I began to think about this try to make sense of all the thing I had heard, I became confused-luckily the wisdom of those more intelligent than me would help.

 

As I lay in bed that night pondering the feasibility of my quest I remembered something that I had learned about. Kant, as part of his rejection of the completely reasoned view of the world, says that we have flawed senses. Part of his proof of this (as I understand it) is that humans all understand the world in constructs of space and time, yet we really cannot grasp the logical conclusions of our own constructs, that space and time must go on infinitely. So even though things might be happening to us in space and time our understanding of these things is not perfect  or even complete; hence even the senses which we seem to have the least trouble agreeing on as a race, (the sensing of space travelling through time) is problematic. What does this have to do with my quest? well it means that (and this is more obvious I think) the senses which we all know are less trustworthy (sight, sound, memory) appear to be on even shakier ground than before we started thinking about our conceptions of space and time. I think its safe to say that it would be a mark of extreme hubris, in light of these personal reflections, to begin to venture a guess as to what it is that all humans want. So my ostensible quest is now merely a skeleton of a question, in fact it now appears that all my knowledge is merely a haphazard guess a collection of visions, sounds, feelings, and memories compressed into a brain which merely puts it into a convenient order- a hopeless and disturbing thought for one who wants to know things.

 

However, I cannot leave the journal in such a sad state, partly because it would be disturbing to the readers, and also partly because I dont fully believe my last statement. What I believe is this, as a human, you have only one brain to trust, and one life to make sense out of, so instead of despairing about not knowing anything, you can at least try to¨know yourself¨ (my favorite socratic dictum). So out of the death of the last question a new question arises, instead of asking what other people want, I will ask what I really want.