The Tao of Travel

Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges's view, floated beautifully through his poem "Happiness" (

La Dicha

), that in our encounters with the world, "everything happens for the first time" Just as "whoever embraces a woman is Adam," and "whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,"anyone's first view of the Sphinx sees it new: "In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted ... Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal."—

DSS

Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

—Madame de Staël,

Corinne, ou l'Italie

(1807)

Two Paradoxes of Travel

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

—Carson McCullers, "Look Homeward, Americans,"

Vogue

(1940)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

—Vladimir Nabokov,

Lectures on Russian Literature

(1982)

Solitary Travel

Solitary Travelers: Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.

—Sir Francis Galton,

The Art of Travel

(1855)

Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining" and "You see a lot of trees here.

"

It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.—

OPE

In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory.—

GTES

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.—

OPE

The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but