“As for yesterday’s Flemish countryside! You can’t look at it without questioning everything. These little squat houses which haven’t dared risk an extra story in the direction of heaven, and then suddenly there flames in the air the tall cone of a church steeple, as if there were only this in man capable of going up, of taking its chances on height.”
From the beginning, it was obvious that the travel writings of Henri Michaux (1899-1984) would be anything but anodyne. Before he visited Asia, India, Africa, and the interior world of drugs, Michaux visited Ecuador in 1928. The trip, two years in the planning, was the idea of a friend. To the question 'why Ecuador?' there is no coherent answer, just a young man, callow and inexperienced but willing to experiment on himself, and practice "a Socratic ignorance".
“This earth has has all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred year we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth’s interior, humanity is finished.”
“You go forward here like police detectives. Simply to sit down you have to take laboratorylike precautions. Whereas in Europe you can give yourself up to the outdoors, and exist with it on equal terms.
“Ghastly your first moment in a port. It looks as if you’ve landed in a country of engineers. Hmm! So this is what the world is like! Must you start your life all over? You walk forward awkwardly. Hmm! Finally there are some gardens and book stores and houses where no one is doing anything, and you breathe.”
“You go forward here like police detectives. Simply to sit down you have to take laboratorylike precautions. Whereas in Europe you can give yourself up to the outdoors, and exist with it on equal terms.
As for owning property here … What then? The serpent comes and kills you in your own house.”
So much for a green paradise of mountains and rain forests, the place that disorients the normal human relationship with the sky or, as Michaux dubbed it, 'The Dimension Crisis.' 
Of course his luggage misses the only train of the week. The inanimate world remains impervious to his search for a self.
Of course his luggage misses the only train of the week. The inanimate world remains impervious to his search for a self. Excerpts from Ecuador: A Travel Journal by Henri Muchaux, translated from the French by Robin Magowan, 2001 (1968 –Ediitions Gallimard, Paris) Marlboro Press/Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois.
Image: James Ensor - The Towers of Lissewege, 1890, Socinder Foundation, Berne.
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