The Jaipur Literature Festival: A Celebration of Travel and Creativity
The Jaipur Literature Festival is the world’s largest of its kind, bringing together writers, thinkers, leaders, and humanitarians to champion the freedom to engage in thoughtful discussions. This year, the festival was transported to Soneva Fushi, a breathtaking island getaway in the Maldives. The event featured an exciting lineup that included movie screenings under the stars in the middle of the ocean, live music and dance performances, sunrise yoga, and sunset poetry recitals. Festival attendees shared their favorite travel stories and the most inspiring places they’ve visited.
André Aciman
Born in Egypt, Aciman is the author of the international bestseller, Call Me By Your Name. He lives in New York.
What has been the role of travel in your life?
“Frankly, one of the real reasons I travel is because I am looking for a real home. I’m always traveling with the unstated and unformatted hope that, just maybe, as I am walking in the streets of Barcelona, I will feel a pull that tells me to stop here, telling me that I belong here, and I am going to live here for the remainder of my life. But it has never happened – yet.”
In your talk, you mentioned that you often travel mentally and sometimes you don’t even need to be in a place to write about it. Tell us about your relationship with travel.
“I don’t know how to live in the moment at all. I’m always an outlier when it comes to time – I’m always out of bounds somehow. My best experience was when I was in Bethlehem. I was there with a photographer and he was taking pictures, and he kept pointing things out with excitement. He would say ‘Oh, did you see this!’ and ‘Did you see that?’ – and I realized I wasn’t really seeing anything at all. When I write, I write retrospectively. I write my stories on the plane back home. That has always been my experience: on the way back home, I begin to retrospectively put myself back in the place, because that is my comfort zone – I need to be out of sync in order to write about a place. That’s how I’ve lived my whole life: it’s my comfort zone. I seek writing as a way of anchoring myself, if only temporarily, on paper.”
Do you think there’s something about being up in the air, or on a flight, that makes you think or write differently?
“When I’m on a plane, I’m already missing the place that I’ve just left. It’s a strange state of contradiction. As I’m on the way back, I’m already saying to myself: ‘why didn’t I stay an extra few days? Why didn’t I seek that thing out that I’ve been dying to find?’ There are so many whys – and on the plane home is when all the whys crop up. There are so many things to see. It’s when I’m no longer able to do or see these things that I most desperately want to do and see them – it’s always the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘woulds’ that have defined my whole existence.”
