Braver Than You Think:
Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime
by Maggie Downs
力量ある作家さんのテーマ性もストーリーも秀逸な一冊
Braver Than You think(自分で思うより勇敢だ、という意味)のこの本、
ポッドキャストの157話の「3人で読書対談」でおすすめ本としてNikkiが挙げてくれていた一冊。
Nikkiの紹介では確か「お母さんが行きたかった場所を1年間かけて旅する話」とのことだったと思う。
コロナ禍で旅行に行けない今、旅行小説はとびきり楽しめるジャンル。
以前NikkiからはYellow Envelopeという、これまた世界を旅する楽しい小説を教えてもらって
旅を疑似体験させてもらったのでこちらも楽しいに違いない、
そんな軽い気持ちで手にとった一冊でしたが、ただの旅行小説じゃなかったのでした。
読書ノート
心に留まった箇所を記録していきます。
- For years I thought marriage was incompatible with the life I wanted to lead as an independent woman
- (マチュピチュのDead Woman’s Passの 後半、3000フィート上昇するトレッキングコースにて) After about an hour, I enter a Zen-like meditation, in which I count my steps and allow the numbers to fill my head. “One, two, three … ugh, four, five, six …” Every time I get to 250, I start over.
- My mother was sow to bandage me. Instead she told me to give my cuts sunshine and air, the necessary ingredients to heal.
- I know my mom’s death is coming, and that wound is raw and vulnerable. But Machu Picchu is a reminder of timelessness. Even when abandoned, it wasn’t destroyed. Some things never disappear.
- Whenever I had friends over for dinner as a kid, my mom trotted out pizza and soda and anything to please, as if she could buy my friends’ affection with grease and sugar. I was an awkward kid, a total nerd, and she believed that food could fix almost anything, even smooth over my social missteps.
- smooth over my social missteps.
- Up until this point, my entire life has been separated from physical labor, other than helping around the house or weeding the occasional garden.
- The distance between home and where I’m standing has never seemed greater. No one tells you this at the start of a journey—that the gap between places can widen so far, it’s possible you’ll never go back to the place you were.
- One thing I have trouble admitting, even to myself, is that I’m terrified of what happens if the disease comes for me. I don’t want Jason to have to live with the wreckage of my mind. I don’t want my family and friends to witness my erasure. Part of the reason I embarked on this trip was to complete my mom’s goals, but this is also a battle against the disease itself, cramming myself full of my own memories, hoarding them and holding them tight, before anything is taken. I know that’s not the way things work. The only reliable thing is unpredictability, and diseases strike when you least expect them, as do animals. But I have to try.
- The whole reason I wanted to travel was to see what I was made of, to discover how strong I could really be, to live out the dreams of my mother.
- The realization that I would not have a future was something that came to me when my mom was diagnosed, so this moment is not entirely unexpected. I put myself here on purpose, chasing adventure for the sake of living deliberately and passionately. This is the risk of being an active and living participant in the world. Death happens because life does.
- In that way, the power of chance is like my mom’s disease. There is no reason for the Alzheimer’s, and there is nothing to blame. She didn’t do anything risky or dangerous; she didn’t go looking for a disease. It just happened. Before my family knew what was happening to her, she was already headed downhill into the thick, fierce storm.
- (残りの旅をキャンセルしてブエノスアイレスに長く滞在してしまいたいと感じた時に「ホームの概念について)It makes me wonder about the nature of home, what it means to feel so comfortable in a place where I have no roots, no right to stay, and no reason to belong. (中略)This place is cluttered with litter. The crowd is noisy. I have no roots here. There are no ancestral springs in this land for me. Still I feel like my notion of hoe has already changed and stretched to include this part of the world., this city this stadium, this night. Maybe I don’t need to stay here, but I will carry this place with me as I move on.
- There’s an old saying in South Africa that a single straw from a broom can be broken, but together they are strong. That concept is known as ubuntu, the philosophy that we are all part of an interconnected web, rooted in acts of kindness and generosity. It means the way we treat others is more important than our individual accomplishments. Essentially, you can’t be human all by yourself.
- My husband once told me that the brain is always seeking patterns, because it doesn’t like what it doesn’t already know. That’s why people see faces and animals and shapes in clouds—because our brains are trying to create something familiar out of the senseless and unknown.
- Katie is a Canadian who has been living in Rwanda for six months, building websites for small businesses to fund travels throughout Africa. She says she’s here for research—she’s writing a guide to volunteer opportunities in East Africa.
- Nile is shaped like the lotus flower, a symbol of renewal for the ancient Egyptians.
- (ルワンダ)Above the main entrance, a banner reads in Kinyarwanda: “If you had known me, and you had really known yourself, you would not have killed me.”
- (道端の今にも死にそうなロバに手持ちの水を分け与えたバックパッカー)I don’t know how long the donkey will live. But Tanya’s compassion shows me how action snowballs into inspiration, which in turn becomes a call to action for others.
- I am miserable. I’ve heard that plants are grateful for the cold, and that some flowers only bloom in the mud. The idea is not just that harsh conditions cultivate beautiful things, but also that we have to endure suffering in order to appreciate the lack of suffering. Pain is the necessary element for growth.
- “Enlightenment is boring.”
- All this time I’ve been operating under the assumption that my mom didn’t get to accomplish what she wanted to accomplish, simply because she didn’t make it to specific destinations. She didn’t achieve her goals, or, at least, what I thought her goals were. But the act of living a life is the act of establishing priorities. Maybe people do what they want to do. And perhaps what my mom wanted to do, more than she wanted the world, was to be with me.
- Enlightenment is boring, and it looks something like this: shuffling through the dark, trusting there’s a trail beneath your feet that leads into sunshine, movement, and joy.
- “In India, love comes after marriage.” At first it strikes me as funny, but the more I think about it, the more I can see how that works. Marriages take work, initial attraction fades, and being in love each day is a choice.
- We never experience the world exactly as it is. We bring our expectations to a moment, and then we see that through varying lenses of hope, grief, and disappointment—especially the despair that descends when something doesn’t live up to the idea we have constructed. That’s why it’s difficult for travel to meet expectations, and why places don’t live up to the hype. They can’t. We spend our lives chasing the excitement of the new and the flutter of anticipation, but travel means reckoning with real life. I think if I came to Ha Long Bay as the same traveler who started my trip just under a year ago, I would have been disappointed by the more commercial, touristy aspects.
- what I’m learning is that making memories involves accepting the world the way it comes to you, not the way you wish it to be.
- If I accept the world as is, that means me too. The bay is still, I feel alone in it, and I am not lonely.
- It shows me once again how regret must be risked in order to discover delight. Because the result is wilder, fiercer, and more exhilarating than you’ve imagined.
この本のこと、Nikkiと近々話し合ってみたいなと思います。