The chance encounters of Jan Morris
Or, a wide world of weirdos
When taking stock of our lives, we naturally focus on those we care about the most. But what of those we care about the least?
Not the people you’re headed out to meet, but the ones you run into along the way. The neighbour you nod at, the colleague who asks about weekend plans, the barista who spelled your name Kark when you said it was Marc with a K — like all of us, Jan Morris spent her life accumulating these interactions.
Like none of us, the late Welsh travel writer compiled hundreds of these random nameless connections in a clever collection called Contact! A Book of Glimpses. The net effect shows just how much these interstitials matter, if you’re able to notice them in the first place and then find the words to make them last. (It also helps to be well-travelled.)
There are the Swiss border guards who “habitually greeted us with a mixture of respect and condescension, covering all contingencies,” and the Washingtonian woman in a blue silk turban who proclaimed:
“I sometimes wonder, oh, what kind of a world are we bringing our children into, when you have to pay a quarter for a doughnut!”
And the man who was “so allegorically Dutch” that she expected him to talk about “Rembrandt, tulips, dykes, the German occupation, Queen Beatrix, the new season’s herrings, Admiral de Ruyter, or whatever was playing at the Concertgebouw that evening.” He proceeded to disappoint by discussing “unemployment, too many Asian immigrants, keeping his weight down, and his hopes, earlier in life, of being a professional footballer.” As Morris concludes, “He was a citizen of the Netherlands, but I have met him all over Western Europe, and that’s what he always talks about.”
Here’s a whole city in a single sentence:
“Key West is full of people with nothing much to do, but a talent for lounging gracefully in doorways.”
And here’s a whole man — specifically Yves Saint-Laurent:
“He told me that the only books he ever read were eleven volumes of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, over and over again, but that the twelfth and last volume he had never read at all — saving it up, I suppose, for a last splurge of Frenchness on his deathbed chaise longue.”
Her best glimpses are so slight that they’re all in the telling, like this one from the New South Wales Art Gallery:
“Now this is a Picasso,’ I heard a teacher say in the gallery one day. ‘I’m sure you all know who Picasso was.’ ‘I don’t,’ piped up a solitary small Australian at the back, and I bowed to him as the only absolutely honest soul in sight.”
Morris began her writing career by ascending Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and made her biggest splash with Conundrum, her 1974 account of transitioning from male to female, a process she punningly described as “at-one-ment.” She chronicled the extraordinary in more than 40 books, which is why this collection of the ordinary is such a pleasure. Nothing much happens, and it does so with sparkle.
Quick quips; lightning
“If I return people’s greetings, I do so only to give them their greeting back.”
— Karl Kraus
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
— Mark Twain
“The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man’s taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled.”
— Robert Benchley
Speaking of...
The indignities of travel
The genius of the obvious
That was your brief encounter with GWQ No. 131. If Tommy Bahama told me that the only book he ever read was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, I guess I’d have to wear his clothes? In one of her last interviews, Morris dropped this gem: “If you are not sure what you think about something, the most useful questions are these: Are you being kind? Are they being kind? That usually gives you the answer.” Kindly tap the ❤️ below.