I Don't Need to Travel, For the World is Merely My Idea
March 22, 2026
Last weekend I returned to a childhood pastime: I SPY Treasure Hunt, a CD-ROM game published in 2001 by Black Hammer Productions, Inc. I have many fond memories of their prior work, I SPY Spooky Mansion, but Treasure Hunt is the game that more fully captured my imagination.
At the beginning of the game, you alight from a train in Smuggler’s Cove, a town filled with I SPY dioramas, and as you hunt for hidden objects, you collect pieces of a map which, finally, leads you to a hidden treasure. As far as I can reckon, this game was my first exposure to a nautical setting. While the game takes place almost entirely on land (although you do ride a fishing boat to a nearby island), the town of Smuggler’s Cove is oriented toward the sea; most of the objects you’re finding are anchors, oars, boats, birds, shells, and of course, skulls. You could describe I SPY Treasure Hunt as pirate-themed, but the pirate aspects never particularly struck me, and I have remained generally nonplussed by pirates ever since.
I grew up next to the ocean, but my town wasn’t oriented toward the sea in the way that Smuggler’s Cove is. Vancouver developed a little too late in history to be a truly nautical city, and the forests and mountains to its north and east prove far too much of a distraction from the vast ocean. There are pockets with a fishy feel, such as Steveston in Richmond, full of fishmongers, fish-and-chip shops, ice cream parlours, and the like, but the real ocean experience is only to be found a ferry-ride away on Vancouver Island (also known as “the island.”)
I wrote on this website about my most recent island visit, a day-trip to a subsidiary island called Mayne Island, but my most significant Island Trip in recent memory was in 2021, when my wife and I spent several days on Gabriola Island, an even smaller island just off the coast of Nanaimo. Gabriola is a hippy-ish kind of island, mainly consisting of small houses on large lots, whose inhabitants fill all that empty space with sculptures, wood carvings, trash heaps, alpaca farms, mystical gardens, and other such whimsies.
At the marina, one can rent kayaks and canoes, and one inevitably does, because why else would one be on an island than to use it as a jumping-off point to get to sea? We rode our kayak to a small islet, about 250m across, the only one in the local archipelago whose coast is not privately owned. There, we disembarked, pretending to have survived a nautical mishap. Of course, instead of gathering resources — for there were none, the island being a mere rock — we simply gallivanted about, climbing to the highest vantage point and peering across at sea and land.
Our trip to Gabriola Island was the best type of trip: a trip whose purpose is to indulge in a fantasy. The best places to visit are the places you’ve read about in books. I’ve never read a book about Gabriola Island specifically, but I have read plenty of accounts of islands from all across the Pacific, and my imagination is vast enough to fill in the gaps. While we were visiting, I was reading Omoo by Herman Melville, which of course takes place in Tahiti, almost 8000km away, but the general idea was close enough — ships, water, beaches, etc. But behind Omoo, in some deep recess of my mind, was lurking I SPY Treasure Hunt.
Herman Melville’s oeuvre is full of nautical adventures and a fair few nautical mishaps, depicted through the eyes of an often naive young philosopher for whom the sea is more than just a pile of water; it is instead a canvas on which the world’s innate Literature finds its form. Its hard to find a writer for whom the sea is just the sea, or an island just an island. In Robinson Crusoe, a deserted island is the perfect blank slate on which to etch the superiority of European ingenuity; The Mysterious Island tells a similar tale, albeit one more concerned with companionship, cooperation, and a grand, overwhelming enigma.
Robinson Crusoe is a horribly unlucky man, dooming ship after ship to wreck and disaster. Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym shares a similar fate, suffering through a series of traumatic experiences on the way to a wildly ambiguous spiritual experience near the South Pole. These unlucky men are warned by Providence several times against going to sea, and yet they continue to stubbornly abandon land at every opportunity. Ishmael is right to say that, for some, the sea possesses far too strong a magnetic force to allow their legs to remain on solid ground.
For all this, I’ve never been to sea, not truly. I’ve been on countless ferries — including a pirate-themed ship in Hakone’s Lake Ashi and a 19th-century-themed steamer in the South Saskatchewan River — but I’ve never taken to sea in any real sense. I don’t really mind this. I never yearn for the sea breeze in my lungs, or the flapping of sails in my ears. The other day while pulling hoses at work, I pretended I was working the rigging on a ship-of-the-line, but that’s the extent of the whole thing: idle fantasy. This is because it is my fate not to live life, but to read about it in books.
My favourite part of In Search of Lost Time is Volume 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, specifically Part II: “Place-names: the Place” (a title which defies all comprehension), in which our young hero travels to the coastal resort town of Balbec with his grandmother, where he spends a pleasant summer cavorting with a group of similarly-aged girls. This group includes young Albertine, who will later become his second and most tormentuous love. But it’s not Albertine who first catches his eye; in fact, he develops crushes on each girl in succession, with Albertine being only the most receptive to his affections.
The novel is a depiction of adolescence which includes all the anxiety and torment that characterizes such a time. The narrator is never quite “on vacation,” for he is always chasing after one thing or another, always looking to ingratiate himself with the next person that catches his eye. This is because he doesn’t have anything to take a vacation from: he is just living his same floating life in a different locale.
The concepts of travel and vacation are often conflated, and there is good reason for this. We often travel to take a vacation, because the best way to relax is to separate oneself spatially and mentally from whatever causes one stress. And also, if one has a job, one must take “vacation time” in order to travel. But of course, travel and vacation are two very different things. The purpose of a vacation is to relax; the purpose of travel to see and do things. These two purposes can be at odds: travelling — as in, physically moving from one location to another — is often not relaxing at all, and if all you do once you get there is sit in one place, you don’t see or do much.
As someone living in North America, my experience is that when someone goes to Mexico, they are taking a vacation, because they are most likely headed to an all-inclusive resort to sit on the beach all day; but when someone goes to Europe, they’re going on a trip — they’re “travelling” — because they’re going to cram their days full of excursions to the Colosseum or the Louvre or some other such thing, and most likely to come back fairly exhausted. Of course, one can make any trip into a vacation by utilizing the ultimate modern vacation technology: the cruise ship, but we must admit that this leans way further into the “vacation” side than the “travel” side.
I was thinking the other day about travelling in the ancient world. Cartography was not a particularly advanced science; the only maps we have from the ancient world are fairly vague, communicating the notion that a certain place lies in a particular direction, but not much more than that. When a man in Ancient Greece got on a boat and went to Asia Minor, he wouldn’t mentally place himself on a map, but instead just travelled through physical space, the same way that we might walk from room to room.
This is almost impossible for a modern person to reckon with. Our sense of space is entirely based around maps, to the point where a map feels like a more real depiction of space than, say, going out onto the street and looking around. Most people navigate via GPS (even if they don’t actually look at the GPS but only follow the audio directions), offloading their entire sense of place to a technological entity. I personally feel a keen sense of unease when I can’t place myself on a map, as if I’m not really anywhere at all.
Thus, travel is this strange complex of space and place, converting abstractions into reality in a deeply uncomfortable yet thrilling manner. You can point to a map and say you’ve been somewhere, but you didn’t actually go to a point on a map: you went to a real place. Where it was on the map doesn’t really matter, because most likely you flew there on a plane, catching but a tiny glimpse of what lay in between, and leaving your navigation entirely up to the pilot and the airline. In truth, you teleported there. This form of teleportation can take a long time, for sure, but it’s no less teleportation.
I often feel like I’ve never actually flown to Japan at all, but instead twice fallen into a strange dream that I call My Japan. The first time, I lived a fantasy life which I simultaneously transformed into literature via writing updates for my blog and recording audio diaries (which I never shared anywhere.) Even when I was doing neither of these things, I still thought of my life through the viewpoint of a website — for in the beginning, it was a guy’s website, and the writings I had read on said website, that first gave My Japan its literary aspect. To my mind, the only really lived life was the type of life that was written about on a website; a younger reader may feel the same way about vlogs, livestreams, or Instagram pages. In attempting to live a life worthy of being written about on a website (even if by myself), I suffered great torments, both by the ambiguous interpersonal situations I created, and by the ever-present knowledge that my life was in fact not worthy of being written about on a website at all, despite the fact that I was, in fact, writing about it on a website.
All this is besides the point, perhaps — and also the subject of a work-in-progress novel — but what remains in front of the point, or perhaps on top of the point, or perhaps coincident with the point, or perhaps is the point, is the fundamental connection in my mind between literature and reality: to the extent where I could argue that, in the eyes of the entity named Balckwell, author of this website, literature is in fact more real than anything else, and any reality possessed by other entities is granted to them by their proximity or similarity to literary entities. Which is a very strange thought indeed.
Of course, this requires including, somehow, under the umbrella of Literature, such works as I SPY Treasure Hunt. Despite the vehement protestations of various scholars, I can find no way of defining literature that doesn’t do this. And perhaps the more philologically-minded among my readers will catch on to the fact that when I say Literature, I am really grasping for a less loaded and more metrically satisfying word for “art,” by which word, or set of definitionally equivalent words, I am looking to denote any work that is both the product of an imagination and designed to provoke the imagination of others. And perhaps what I’m truly trying to say is that the Imagination is the realm of true reality, and whatever else exists (if anything) is mere stones and rocks.
Schopenhauer declared that “the world is my idea.” I will admit to the possibility that what he meant by that is very different from that I mean when I say it; however, I read both volumes of his book and came away, years later, with the ideas that I have now. Late in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, Thomas Buddenbrook, an aged businessman, stumbles across a copy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (left unnamed in the novel but obviously implied), and skims through it during a period of great inner turmoil. He is so moved that he spends the night sleepless, ruminating on the consequences of Schopenhauer’s otherworldly metaphysics; however, upon waking and returning to the Worldly World, this feeling leaves him, and he dismisses his psuedo-epiphany as a passing moment of idealistic whimsy. In my case, I never truly returned.
Schopenhauer’s whole system is a sentimental one. When he declares the world to be his idea, what he means is that this world we see can’t possibly be the real one — it’s just a mess of representations we’ve made up based on incomplete information. The real world is somewhere else, and that world is made up of wills, or rather, one grand Cosmic Will, of which we are each but an emanation. The fundamental incompatibility between this Will and the realm we call the World, i.e. the world of representations, is what makes our lives consist of little but endless suffering.
I don’t think our lives consist of little but endless suffering. But I do agree with the idea that our lives are capable of consisting of endless suffering if we don’t play our cards right, or perhaps regardless of whether we play our cards right or wrong. Living in the world is to be constantly pulled into maelstroms whose centre is endless suffering. I go through life like a child sneaking down the hallway of an aging house, carefully avoiding the squeaky floorboards. Perhaps literature is the only place where I feel truly safe. If I don’t take any steps, I can’t fall down. Yes, I know you can always pull yourself back up — but why bother with all this up-and-down in the first place? Why bother with going places and feeling things? Things can go wrong out there, as they so often do. Not in my little world, though… My little world is up to me, and if I don’t like it I can just close the book and drift off somewhere else…