The Tao of Travel

I recognize the Golden Horn.

In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, "I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me—that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily—and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more—What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering?—The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition."

Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries traveled around the globe—Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific—Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.

Thoreau's three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville's greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of "Ktaadn." Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.

Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home

"TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel," Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.

Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? "Neurasthenic"? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveler—Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.

Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet—almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.

Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader—of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau's Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, "She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something—whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire—provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted."

Consider this poem:

Water is taught by thirst.

Land—by the Oceans passed.

Transport—by throe—

Peace—by its battles told—

Love—by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the snow.

The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by "throe"—a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line "sumptuous Destitution."

She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. "Home is a holy thing—nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals," she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And "Duty is black and brown—home is bright and shining." And again, home "is brighter than all the world beside."

Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark