Mare Adriaticum.

• Author: Bakshian, Aram, Jr.
• Position: Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age (New York: Random House). 368 pp. $28.99.

The conviction that travel is a good thing goes back at least as far as Seneca, who observed, "Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind." G.K. Chesterton would add an important caveat: "They say travel broadens the mind." But first, he added, "you must have the mind." James Boswell, who embarked upon a grand tour of Europe in his twenties, had it. So did Benjamin Disraeli when he visited the Middle East as a youth. Then there is the Marquis de Custine, who wrote what is probably the finest account of the Russian Empire. In modern times, however, too many literary travelers set off on their journeys to confirm what they already want to believe, like lawyers in search of fresh evidence to achieve a preconceived verdict.

This is especially true of ideologues with intellectual pretensions whose travel experiences are often little more than international cherry-picking expeditions undertaken to gather selective facts, factoids, and emotional impressions to confirm their existing prejudices and state of mind. T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a classic example of an intellectual writing a powerful, sometimes brilliant narrative that, for all its merits, is fatally flawed by its author's unresolved emotional conflicts, his desperate desire to portray himself as something he is not, and, ultimately, his inability to view his experience of World War I desert warfare and the awakening of modern Arab nationalism with anything approaching objectivity. The result was great travel literature wrapped around a rousing, semi-fictitious adventure yarn, viewed through the cracked emotional lens of Lawrence himself: good reading and bad history.

The truth is that travel can just as easily narrow the mind as broaden it. Much depends on the heft of the traveler's emotional and ideological baggage. This is probably why the best modern writers in the genre tend to travel light.

Enter Robert Kaplan. Kaplan's latest book, Adriatic, is a marvelous mix of history, literature, atmospherics, and personal insight all focused on the little world-within-a-world whose shores are lapped by the Adriatic Sea. While only a modest inlet of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic is where East and West meet and intermingle in the Balkans; it is where Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman, Habsburg, and--in the twentieth century--fascist and communist empires clashed and sometimes coexisted amidst mixed populations of Muslims, Jews, and both Eastern and Western Christians. In his subtitle, Kaplan calls it a "Concert of Civilizations," but, at least so far, the concert has been the uneven work of many different composers, performed by an orchestra with no maestro in evidence. If this complicates Kaplan's task, it also makes it all the more timely. For the challenges and conflicts that most of our larger world faces today--the rival pulls of regionalism, nationalism, language, religion, ethnicity, and globalization, the blurring of shared strategic interests and loyalties in the post-Cold War era, and the fading of faith in traditional religions and mores--have all been playing out in the Adriatic world for centuries, indeed for millennia.

From the outset, Kaplan makes an eloquent case for exploring foreign societies:

A journey of the mind, the scope of the journey is limitless, encompassing all manner of introspection and concerned with the great debates and issues of our age. The glossy travel magazines, selling pure fantasy as they often do--with photo spreads of delectable fashion models set against backgrounds of Third World splendor--manifest nothing so much as boredom. This has nothing to do with travel. Travel is psychoanalysis that starts in a specific moment of time and space ... Because you stand fully conscious before a moon and a sky that are not exactly like they ate in any other place, in any other time, travel is an intensified form of consciousness, and there-fore an affirmation of individual existence: that you have an identity even beyond that which the world, your family, and your...