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In Motion: The Experience of Travel
In this extraordinarily wide-ranging, insightful, and revelatory book, Tony Hiss—the much-praised author of The Experience of Place —delves into a unique and instantly recognizable (though previously undescribed) experience that can happen to us when we travel, a special understanding and ability that can leave us feeling exhilarated. He illustrates how throughout human history—from our ancestors walking upright for the first time to astronauts walking on the moon—we have repeatedly availed ourselves of this seemingly elusive quality, which he calls “Deep Travel.”
The sensation of Deep Travel can overtake us, Hiss says, whenever we tap into a sophisticated, wide-awake awareness we all possess. With a wealth of examples—from evocative accounts of his own journeys to celebrated travel writing across the centuries—Hiss identifies and rescues this powerful capacity and sets out simple techniques for accessing it no matter where we are.
And this is only a jumping-off point for an original and penetrating explanation of how Deep Travel radically alters our perception of not only where we are but also when we are, by placing us in an “extended present,” and how it acts as an open-sesame to enlarge and enrich the world around us. Going even further, he investigates how we can remain absolutely still but travel in time itself, as our horizons move backward to include layers of nature and human culture that have gone before, or project us forward to consider what our actions will mean to those who will inhabit our spot on earth a few generations from now.
Whether travel takes you around the corner or around the world, once you’ve read In Motion , no journey will ever feel the same.
The sensation of Deep Travel can overtake us, Hiss says, whenever we tap into a sophisticated, wide-awake awareness we all possess. With a wealth of examples—from evocative accounts of his own journeys to celebrated travel writing across the centuries—Hiss identifies and rescues this powerful capacity and sets out simple techniques for accessing it no matter where we are.
And this is only a jumping-off point for an original and penetrating explanation of how Deep Travel radically alters our perception of not only where we are but also when we are, by placing us in an “extended present,” and how it acts as an open-sesame to enlarge and enrich the world around us. Going even further, he investigates how we can remain absolutely still but travel in time itself, as our horizons move backward to include layers of nature and human culture that have gone before, or project us forward to consider what our actions will mean to those who will inhabit our spot on earth a few generations from now.
Whether travel takes you around the corner or around the world, once you’ve read In Motion , no journey will ever feel the same.
- GenresNonfictionTravel
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
9 people are currently reading
190 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 8, 2013
I didn't get it. What the heck is "deep travel"? Just "traveling while paying attention"? Someone on the internet mentioned that this book sounded like he just narrated a shroom trip.
A few interesting things he mentions that I could salvage from this book:
- Edward T. Hall, who wrote about different perceptions of time: Hopi time, Navajo time, government bureaucratic time, and the time used by other white men who lived on reservations.
- Irving Biederman and Edward A. Vessel, about how we crave information; it's intrinsically pleasurable and rewarding. "Infovores".
- a little bit of an inventory of types of awareness: primarily daydreaming, focused attention, some wider awareness that he calls Deep Travel or whatever. And then there's flow and others but he pushes those aside.
A few interesting things he mentions that I could salvage from this book:
- Edward T. Hall, who wrote about different perceptions of time: Hopi time, Navajo time, government bureaucratic time, and the time used by other white men who lived on reservations.
- Irving Biederman and Edward A. Vessel, about how we crave information; it's intrinsically pleasurable and rewarding. "Infovores".
- a little bit of an inventory of types of awareness: primarily daydreaming, focused attention, some wider awareness that he calls Deep Travel or whatever. And then there's flow and others but he pushes those aside.
August 21, 2013
In Motion: The Experience of Travel by Tony Hiss defies classification. Ostensibly it’s about travel, and it is, especially about what Hiss dubs “Deep Travel”. But Hiss is a talented writer and has an inquiring mind such that his book works much like Montaigne’s Essays: wandering here and there around a common theme. In some authors, of course, this can prove irksome and off-putting, but in this book, I gladly found myself following Hiss’s detours and by-ways as we explored Deep Travel.
Hiss doesn’t ever definitely define Deep Travel, but this is another potential defect that signals that the search is still underway. As a preliminary, we can say that Deep Travel is that journey, around the corner or around the world, that alters our consciousness. Our mind, in its structures and perceptions, alters as we face a new landscape. Thus, while walking home during the 2003 NYC blackout, the hyper-city of NY alters without the flow of electricity, and Hiss experiences views and perspectives that he’d never encountered before. He also draws on the work of others, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose meditation from a bridge crossing a river in the Balkans provides a verbal portrait of this same type of experience. Hiss transitions from experiences of travel as such into psychology, beginning with the great fountainhead of American psychology, William James, and then drawing upon the more recent insights of the late Edward S. Reed, an “ecological psychologist”. Indeed, a list of psychologists, anthropologist, paleontologists, and other writers and thinkers could go on for some length. Hiss explores here and there ideas as they occur to him. Hiss uses places with similar abandon for launching his insights: New Jersey swamps, NYC streets, Balkan Rivers, the primeval African savannah: so many references to place and ideas makes this into a buffet of ideas.
A lot of the latter part of the book concerns human origins and how we developed our brains that allows the psychology of Deep Travel to develop. Hiss argues that along with concentrated attention, daydreaming, and flow, humans developed a “wide-angle awareness” that allows us to scan and consider our environment with the use of our bi-pedal stance and stereoscopic vision. He relates this to the way cats can leisurely pause to wait for prey to place themselves in a position of exposure; that is, not ready to pounce and not indifferent, but widely alert, something called SMR (sensorimotor rhythm). (EEG leads on cat skulls first gave us this insight—I love the image.) One riff that Hiss takes on this is that exploring for knowledge, such as of place, has a built-in pleasure reward (like sex and food) that promotes such behavior.
It’s difficult to review this work because its ideas are so many and diverse as they array around this general topic. For some, this is a hindrance (see William Dalrymple’s critique in his NYT review), but for me, with Montaigne as a model and sufficient rewards for following Hiss’s curiosity, I really enjoyed the book. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the curiosity to follow him around in this journey of a book—and who has a yen to experience Deep Travel.
Hiss doesn’t ever definitely define Deep Travel, but this is another potential defect that signals that the search is still underway. As a preliminary, we can say that Deep Travel is that journey, around the corner or around the world, that alters our consciousness. Our mind, in its structures and perceptions, alters as we face a new landscape. Thus, while walking home during the 2003 NYC blackout, the hyper-city of NY alters without the flow of electricity, and Hiss experiences views and perspectives that he’d never encountered before. He also draws on the work of others, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose meditation from a bridge crossing a river in the Balkans provides a verbal portrait of this same type of experience. Hiss transitions from experiences of travel as such into psychology, beginning with the great fountainhead of American psychology, William James, and then drawing upon the more recent insights of the late Edward S. Reed, an “ecological psychologist”. Indeed, a list of psychologists, anthropologist, paleontologists, and other writers and thinkers could go on for some length. Hiss explores here and there ideas as they occur to him. Hiss uses places with similar abandon for launching his insights: New Jersey swamps, NYC streets, Balkan Rivers, the primeval African savannah: so many references to place and ideas makes this into a buffet of ideas.
A lot of the latter part of the book concerns human origins and how we developed our brains that allows the psychology of Deep Travel to develop. Hiss argues that along with concentrated attention, daydreaming, and flow, humans developed a “wide-angle awareness” that allows us to scan and consider our environment with the use of our bi-pedal stance and stereoscopic vision. He relates this to the way cats can leisurely pause to wait for prey to place themselves in a position of exposure; that is, not ready to pounce and not indifferent, but widely alert, something called SMR (sensorimotor rhythm). (EEG leads on cat skulls first gave us this insight—I love the image.) One riff that Hiss takes on this is that exploring for knowledge, such as of place, has a built-in pleasure reward (like sex and food) that promotes such behavior.
It’s difficult to review this work because its ideas are so many and diverse as they array around this general topic. For some, this is a hindrance (see William Dalrymple’s critique in his NYT review), but for me, with Montaigne as a model and sufficient rewards for following Hiss’s curiosity, I really enjoyed the book. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the curiosity to follow him around in this journey of a book—and who has a yen to experience Deep Travel.
January 4, 2011
This should probably be 2 stars for it's mind numbingly opaque writing, but it's loaded with interesting ideas and perceptions.
This guy is an intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive individual but his writing is as convoluted as the worst academician. He should find a good writer with whom to collaborate.
This guy is an intelligent, thoughtful and perceptive individual but his writing is as convoluted as the worst academician. He should find a good writer with whom to collaborate.
December 14, 2011
Very interesting concept, and a good read at parts, but often too wordy. Wasn't able to finish it.
August 3, 2022
While I really enjoyed Tony Hiss' THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE years ago as I began research on a similar topic, I ended up being quite disappointed in this book. As someone who loves to travel and read about travel when not able to do it, I thought it would be more about that topic. I found that my background in teaching about cognitive development in my Child Development classes were more helpful in understanding his ideas on Deep Travel, as it seemed somewhat akin to Information Processing Theory. In the end, I found myself skimming chapters as he explored different psychological concepts and never seemed to return to discussing travel or place issues.
October 29, 2010
IN MOTION:The Experience of Travel knocked my socks off. Tony Hiss gives us a quiet but eloquent invitation to renew our sense of all that travel has to offer, whether traveling across oceans or walking around our own neighborhoods. Here's a fresh view of the globe as a paradise for exploration, inner and outer, rather than a territory carved up into continents and bodies of water, some of which are said to be hospitable, and others forbidding. The book discusses the elasticity of time while undergoing expansive experience and asks of the reader a patient persistence. Famous explorers such as Marco Polo, Stanley and Livingston, come alive in these pages, as well as scientists, architects and thinkers of every stripe. While well-researched, the book is also personal. An unforgettable passage about the blackout of 2003 when electric power failed in eight northeastern states and the province of Ontario allows us to follow Hiss, moment by moment, thought by thought, as he and his wife walk half the length of Manhattan to meet their young son and bring him home on foot, while rediscovering the city. "Walking through the blackout now that my eyes were re-tuned (to the dark)," Hiss writes,"one fascinating sight materialized ... a brigade of people still hard at work – night supers and night watchmen. They were standing or sitting on folding chairs outside the open front door of each of the old loft buildings keeping their own eyes steadily trained on the street, and it seemed to me I could sense a force field created nightly by caretakers and cleaners, one that renews the strength of city buildings and helps keep them in readiness for another day." IN MOTION, a life-changing read, sent me frequently to my memories, while tuning up my aspirations. No one who reads this book with an open heart can fail to be changed by it.
March 6, 2015
I read this book for one of my honors classes.
I love traveling, and I think the author has lots of great ideas about the experience of travel. The author is a great writer; his words and sentence structures are perfection. However, at certain points, I felt this book was repetitive, sometimes with too many different small focuses, and over philosophical for my enjoyment.
Overall, the book was alright. I probably wouldn't read it again, and if I were, I would only read some parts of it.
I love traveling, and I think the author has lots of great ideas about the experience of travel. The author is a great writer; his words and sentence structures are perfection. However, at certain points, I felt this book was repetitive, sometimes with too many different small focuses, and over philosophical for my enjoyment.
Overall, the book was alright. I probably wouldn't read it again, and if I were, I would only read some parts of it.
February 28, 2012
Since I love road trips, I was interested in this book which is, essentially, about the history and psychology of travel. I loved the analysis of early walkers (the first bipeds) to those who first walked on the moon. Time, space, human development, culture - they're all brought in to this discussion of the experience of travel.
October 26, 2010
This writer is incredible! Together with his Experience of Place you can travel the world and explore the depths of being human. His writing style is low-key yet perfectly researched and articulate.
November 21, 2010
terrific new book by one of my favorite modern thinkers
October 26, 2010
One of the worst books I have ever read. I abandoned it half way into it.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews