Somewhere Between the Ruins and the Sea: On Matsuo Bashō, Travel, and Exhaustion

Bashō’s journeys were bounded by friction. Ours are bounded by signal. Matsuo Bashō's Oku no Hosomichi — usually rendered in English as The Narrow Road to the Deep North — is one of the great short works in world literature, and its translators cannot agree on where it takes place. Sam Hamill's The Narrow Road to the Interior moves the destination from geography to consciousness. Donald Keene's The Narrow Road to Oku, which he translated four times across his life, keeps the place-name intact: the actual northern hinterland of Honshu. Before Bashō's prose even begins, the translator has already decided how much mystery to leave in.

Bashō himself never had to choose. When he set out in 1689 he was already unwell. He walked slowly, stopped often, relied on charity, and abandoned plans when weather intervened. At a shabby inn during a storm, "bitten by fleas and lice," he wrote of a horse urinating close to his pillow — misery that was acute, even comic, and, crucially, temporary. When the River Oi flooded and held him for days, he wrote of friends in Edo counting the days without him, then walked on once the water dropped. His hardship had edges. It began, it did its work on him, and it ended, which is what let it become a poem rather than a condition.

That boundedness is not incidental to his art. In the spring of 1686, working on the hokku that would become "the old pond," Bashō's disciple Kikaku reportedly proposed opening with yamabuki ya, "yellow rose" — a conventional, decorative image. Bashō chose furuike ya, "old pond," instead, stripping the scene until only the frog's splash remained. Kikaku had tried to supply beauty in advance. Bashō waited for a pause long enough that the world could supply it itself. The lesson isn't really about style. It's about the fact that noticing anything at all requires an interval in which nothing is currently being asked of you — and Bashō's road, brutal as it was, kept generating those intervals. At Nikkō he wrote four lines about having seen fresh leaves in the sun. Nothing is added to the leaves. The poem is what happens when attention is given room to arrive.

Modern exhaustion is harder to name because it has lost this shape entirely. It doesn't resolve like weather. In the small hotels of Lecce or Tbilisi, the people who arrive are not quite tourists and hardly exiles either — they carry the look of people who removed themselves from a place without managing to remove themselves from what the place was making them do. The laptop opens at breakfast and stays open through lunch regardless of the view outside the window. What they have lost is not stamina. It is rhythm: the boundary that once told effort where to stop.

That boundary used to be external and it didn't depend on anyone's willpower. The factory whistle marked the end of a shift whether or not the worker wanted more time. Shops shuttered at an hour nobody had to negotiate. Even war contained its lulls. Effort and recovery moved in counterpoise, like systole and diastole, because something outside the individual was doing the work of drawing the line. What has changed is not that people work harder now but that the line has migrated inside them, where almost nobody can hold it as reliably as an institution once held it for free. Intensity has stopped being an event that starts and finishes; it has become a medium one simply moves through, monitored with the cheerful relentlessness of managerial concern.

Contrast this with the shepherd who walks distances that would break an office worker and then sleeps, while the executive who never leaves his desk lies awake at four in the morning. The difference is not exertion. It is whether exertion is permitted to end. Music runs on the same law: a fortissimo thrills because it emerges from and returns to something quieter. Sustained without interruption, even magnificence collapses into noise, and noise, prolonged, collapses into a numbness the body stops bothering to report.

A few places still hold the older rhythm on purpose. Rome keeps a version of it in the Villa Borghese and on the Janiculum; Kyoto keeps it on the Philosopher's Path. Nobody walks these because they are efficient. They exist to prove a city can still organise itself around something other than throughput — the exception precise enough to show what the rule has become everywhere else.

The same test applies to what people do once the load finally lifts. Bloomsbury went to Charleston, Pound and Bunting to Rapallo, the Lost Generation to Paris, Lu Xun to Shanghai's International Settlement — all departures with a destination, in the sense that something was meant to get made there. Today's withdrawals are more often purely defensive: the wish to sleep without interruption, finish a thought, or get through a day without being addressed by anything. A project has a shape, a beginning and an end — the same boundedness Bashō's own hardship had. A pure retreat from demand has no shape at all, nothing to complete, only pressure to reduce, which is exactly why it so rarely feels like it has worked even when it has.

None of this should sentimentalise Bashō's century. When he died in 1694 his final poem returned to the road one more time: "Seized with a disease / Halfway on the road, / My dreams keep revolving / Round the withered moor." His century was not gentler. It simply delivered hardship in a form the body could register, answer, and set down. Ours arrives instead as a climate — ambient, continuous, without the edges that would let it become a memory rather than a permanent condition.

That is why it registers as a private failure rather than what it usually is: a signal that load has exceeded design. The thinker Mark Fisher, who died in 2017 at 48, wrote about this collapse better than most before disappearing into it himself; Simon Reynolds later observed that the mental anguish of the period cannot be understood if it is treated only as a private matter suffered by damaged individuals. Something has quietly inverted. Human capacity is now handled as the flexible, self-repairing part of the system, while the organisation of work around it — the pension fund, the shareholder return, the always-open inbox — is treated as the fixed part that must be protected. Nobody decided this. It simply became easier to ask the body to bend than the structure.

Bashō's road was hard but heavily punctuated: weather, illness, bad inns, flooded rivers, each of which eventually let go. Ours is easier in almost every material sense and yet strangely difficult to leave even when nothing visible is stopping us. His journeys were bounded by friction. Ours are bounded by signal — and the second, having no edges to wear against, may be the harder one to survive.