By Nasser Aldhaheri.
One of the most significant and en riching lessons I’ve learned through my classes is the art of storytelling in travel. I believe that a person lives to narrate; everything in life is built upon stories, starting from childhood as a listener to adulthood as a storyteller.
The most beautiful narratives are those that arise from travel and through travel, for the traveler’s passion and the writer’s quest in volve seeking stories in the corners of places, intertwining them with human emotions to recount them to others, aiming for knowledge, enjoyment, and astonishment while sharing personal experiences in journeys of discovering the world and even discovering oneself.
I have been particularly captivated by the lessons on narrative journalism in travel, and the craft of retelling travel stories in a clearer, more enjoyable, and engaging manner.
The most moving tales are those that begin with oneself or lead one to dis cover themselves through the story.
Thus, I found myself drawn to an old theme nestled within me since childhood: observing time and its passage on human faces, and how time defeats the body in its final stages. The signs of this defeat manifest as a cane in the hand of a person who once ran, walked, and raced against time in life.
There are also the white beards that settle upon men’s chests and the lines of time etched on faces, each a testament to sub mission to the rule of time. With my camera, I’ve followed the third foot, the cane in the person’s hand, the white beards veiling men’s faces, and the footsteps of time marked on the creases of human faces in every city, island, and place I’ve visited around the world. I was like one who walks be hind their white shadows.
As time is an ancient and eternal game between the gods and humanity, perplexing man since time immemorial, it has been wrestling with death since the beginning, searching for the herb of immortality, as depicted in the Assyrian legends of “Gilgamesh”, or in the grand construction of temples and tombs as seen in Pharaonic civilization. There is “Sisyphus” of Greek lore with his cursed rock, “Don Quixote” battling windmills, and “Alexander the Great” with his conquests that defy history, striving to condense geography by seizing distances, or Christ with the soft-spoken wars of his words. Everyone sought to tame time and gain something from immortality.
Time has been a theme in the world’s literature, such as in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities”. Before them were Buddha’s questions: Why does man get sick? Why does he age? Why does he die?
Being concerned with time, the moment of in spiration struck when I stood as a child in front of Big Ben in London, watching its giant hands and sinister ticks. It dawned on me then that it was the lady of time. This began my long journey through every city’s clock and its ancient towers, as if they were guardians of time and cities. I captured them in all their states, during times of love and war, across the four seasons, in their relationships with people and their memories, and the connection between these clocks and the statues residing nearby: station clocks, clocks of sacred cities, Salvador Dalí’s surreal melting clocks, astronomical clocks, flower clocks, water clocks, solar clocks, and others.
I am contemplating that my final master’s thesis should focus on the clocks of cities as witness es to the passage of time
through them, as I seek a unique and distinctive topic far removed from conventional thinking. While the subject may seem a bit challenging and carries a philosophical dimension, especially as it deals with time and humanity and tells the stories of the world’s city clocks and the events and fluctuations they have witnessed over their long lives, it represents icons of cities and a cherished heritage for people.
Humans are not the only ones capable of telling stories; the clocks of the cities and their guardians have many tales to tell.
This article is part of the practical work carried out by the students of the Master’s in Travel Journalism.
