The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

1. Travel in Brief

The Necessity to Move

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

— D. H. Lawrence,Sea and Sardinia(1921)

Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.

— Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen,Hans Christian Andersen(2005)

The Road Is Life

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road(1958)

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

— James Baldwin,Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back. — DSS

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills. — POH

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. — FAF

The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still. — SWS

It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling. — GTES

Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. — FAF

Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler. — POH

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough. — POH

In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain. — KBS

Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts. — GRB

All travel is circular… After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. — GRB

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell. — HIO

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere. — POH

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home — indeed, looking for the perfect memory. — FAF

When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, "Nowhere." Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness. — OPE

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. — GTES

One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest. — GTES

I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood — hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey. — DSS

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 by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of you as money on two legs. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet. — GTES

In the best travel books the word "alone" is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. The conceit of this, the idea of being able to report it — for I had deliberately set out to write a book, hadn't I? — made up for the discomfort. Alone, alone: it was like proof of my success. I had had to travel very far to arrive at this solitary condition. — OPE

There was no concept of solitariness among the Pacific islanders I traveled among that did not also imply misery or mental decline. Reading as a recreation was not indulged in much on these islands either — for that same reason, because you did it alone. Illiteracy had nothing to do with it, and there were plenty of schools. They knew from experience that a person who cut himself off, who was frequently seen alone — reading books, away from the hut, walking on the beach, on his own — was sunk in musu, the condition of deep melancholy, and was either contemplating murder or suicide, probably both. — HIO

All travelers are like aging women, now homely beauties; the strange land flirts, then jilts and makes a fool of the stranger. There was no hell like a stranger's Sunday. — WE

Anonymity in Travel

On the days when I did not speak to anyone I felt I had lost thirty pounds, and if I did not talk for two days in a row I had the alarming impression that I was about to vanish. Silence made me

feel invisible. Yet to be anonymous and traveling in an interesting place is an intoxication. — KBS

Being invisible — the usual condition of the older traveler, is much more useful than being obvious. — GTES

The temporariness of travel often intensifies friendship and turns it into intimacy. But this is fatal for someone with a train to catch. I could handle strangers, but friends required attention and made me feel conspicuous. It was easier to travel in solitary anonymity, twirling my mustache, puffing my pipe, shipping out of town at dawn. — OPE

Travelers' Conceits

One traveler's conceit is that he is heading into the unknown. The best travel is a leap in the dark. If the destination were familiar and friendly what would be the point in going there? — DSS

Another traveler's conceit is that barbarism is something singular and foreign, to be encountered halfway round the world in some pinched and parochial backwater. The traveler journeys to this remote place and it seems to be so: he is offered a glimpse of the worst atrocities that can be served up by a sadistic government. And then, to his shame, he realizes that they are identical to ones advocated and diligently applied by his own government. As for the sanctimony of people who seem blind to the fact that mass murder is still an annual event, look at Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Tibet, Burma and elsewhere — the truer shout is not "Never again," but "Again and again." — GTES

Yet another traveler's conceit is that no one will see what he has seen; his trip displaces the landscape, and his version of events is all that matters. He is certainly kidding himself in this, but if he didn't kid himself a little he would never go anywhere. — KBS

Strangers in Travel

Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move toward an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, improvising the trip. — GTES

Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life. — GTES

Cities and Travel

One of the pitfalls of long journeys is the tendency of the traveler to miniaturize a big city — not out of malice or frivolity, but for his or her own peace of mind. — RIR

My ideal of travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cities are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent. — FAF

Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look offinality breathing You've arrived to the traveler. — POH

"Athens is a four-hour city," one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging cities. — POH

Adventure

Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that people you trust have warned you against. — FAF

For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have become trophies. — FAF

Travel and Optimism

It was the poor person's way of going abroad — standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action. — KBS

Travel, its very motion, ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. — FAF

Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life. — GTES

Travel and Tradition

Villages endure destitution better than towns, and rural poverty can perversely seem almost picturesque. — POH

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting. But seldom-visited places where people were still living settled traditional lives seemed to me the most worthwhile, because they were the most coherent — they were readable and nearly always I felt uplifted by them. — POH

Observing local rituals while traveling is important, not for

its dubious sanctity, but because the set of gestures in rituals reveals the inner state of the people involved and their subtle protocol. — GTES

Travel and Politics

Any country which displays more than one statue of the same living politician is a country which is headed for trouble. — POH

In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed. — DSS

Sightseeing is perfect for a dictatorship — China is surely not anything else, politically speaking. The tourist visits, sees the sights, and when they've all been seen, it's time to go. The non-sightseer lingers, ignores the museums, asks awkward questions, fills people with alarm and despondency, and has to be deported. — RIR

Travel and Porno

It seemed incontestable to me that a country's pornography was a glimpse into its subconscious mind, revealing its inner life, its fantasy, its guilts, its passions, even its child-rearing, not to say its marriages and courtship rituals. It was not the whole truth, but it contained many clues and even more warnings, especially of its men. — POH

Landscape in Travel

A landscape looks different when you know the names of things, and conversely, can look exceedingly inhospitable and alien when it seems nameless. — FAF

It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, the drone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence — true silence — is almost unknown. But on my last day here in Palau's Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room. — FAF

Africa, seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength — binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, re-creating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction. That's why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single troubled landscape. — DSS

The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange landscape. — SWS

Travel as a Waste of Time

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)

Now my mind is made up. The whole journey is a trap. Travel does not broaden you so much as make you sophisticated, "up-to-date," taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury.

The look of a go-getter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry.

— Henri Michaux, Ecuador (1970)

Travel, indeed, struck him as a being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience… No doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.

— Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Against Nature by J.-K. Huysmans (1884), translated by Robert Baldick (1959)

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. — GTES

The Traveler as a Voyeur

The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

But there is curiosity. Even the most timid fantasists need the satisfaction of now and then enacting their fantasies. And sometimes you just have to clear out. Trespassing is a pleasure for some of us. As for idleness, "An aimless joy is a pure joy." — GTES

Travel as Intrusion

It is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all sorts of spoil. This story [Heart of Darkness], and one other… are all the spoil I brought out from the center of Africa, where, really, I had no sort of business.

— Joseph Conrad, Author's Note, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether (1902)

Travel as Transformation

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

— Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad (1869)

There is a change that takes place in a man or a woman in transit. You see this at its most exaggerated on a ship when whole personalities change.

— John Steinbeck, letter, June 1960, in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975)

The person who wrote these notes died upon stepping once again onto Argentine soil. The person who edits and polishes them, me, is no longer. At least I am not the person I was before. The vagabonding through our "America" has changed me more than I thought.

— Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Notas de Viaje (The Motorcycle Diaries), in Jon Lee Anderson, Che (2010)

The Traveler Must Be Worthy

The traveler must be himself, in men's eyes, a man worthy to live under the bent of God's heaven, and were it without a religion: he is such who has a clean human heart and long-suffering under his bare shirt; it is enough and though the way be full of harms, he may travel to the end of the world.

— C. M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888)

Traveling Makes One Modest

To go back to Kuchuk [a courtesan and dancer in Esna]. You and I are thinking of her, but she is certainly not thinking of us. We are weaving an aesthetic around her, whereas this particular very interesting tourist who was vouchsafed the honors of her couch has vanished from her memory completely, like many others. Ah! Traveling makes one modest — you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

— Gustave Flaubert, in Flaubert in Egypt, translated by Francis Steegmuller (1972)

Travel Writing

Literature is made out of the misfortunes of others. A large number of travel books fail simply because of the monotonous good luck of their authors.

— V. S. Pritchett, Complete Essays (1991)

Travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving as promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography… The anonymous hotel room in a strange city drives one into the confessional mode. — GRB

The difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. — GRB

When something human is recorded, good travel writing happens. — TEE

Whatever else travel writing is, it is certainly different from writing a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act — like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence. — TEE

On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale. — RIR

One of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing. There has never been a Melville on the moon, or even an Updike. — FAF

Lawrence's journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books — the eye slowly taking it all in, the aching feet imposing the leisure to observe the common people in the smoky inn kitchen.

— Anthony Burgess, Introduction, Lawrence and Italy (1972)

[Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi] has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the "soul" of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.

— George Orwell, in the weekly Tribune, December 4, 1942, in Orwell: Complete Works (1968)

The Speed of Travel

I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot.

— Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map (2009)

Time Travel

The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life. — GTES

Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present — but the present contains the future. — KBS

Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past. — HIO

A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward. — GTES

Traveling in a Time of Trouble

A national crisis, a political convulsion, is an opportunity, a gift to the traveler; nothing is more revealing of a place to a stranger than trouble. Even if the crisis is incomprehensible, as it usually is, it lends drama to the day and transforms the traveler into an eyewitness. — GTES

Travel and Love

If one is loved and feels free and has gotten to know the world somewhat, travel is simpler and happier. — GTES

Smell a Country to Understand It

[Kipling's] gift is to make people see (for the first condition of right thought is right sensation, the first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it).

— T. S. Eliot, A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)

Travel as a Love Affair

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with… All good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

— Pico Iyer, "Why We Travel,"Salon (2000)

Tourism and Sightseeing

The tourist is part of the landscape of our civilization, as the pilgrim was in the Middle Ages.

— V. S. Pritchett, The Spanish Temper (1954)

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to the another.

— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky (1949)

Tourists don't know where they've been, I thought. Travelers don't know where they're going. — HIO

In Mumbai: A tourist would have been in a temple or a museum. I had been in a slum. — GTES

Sightseeing is an activity that delights the truly idle because it seems so much like scholarship, gawping and eavesdropping on antiquity. — GRB

Sightseeing was a way of passing the time, but… it was activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled. — GRB

Sightseeing is one of the more doubtful aspects of travel… It has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits. — SWS

Only a fool blames his bad vacation on the rain. — TEE

Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. — OPE

Nothing is more bewildering to a foreigner than a nation's pleasures. — KBS

Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet. It was also my experience that one of the worst aspects of traveling with wealthy people, apart from the fact that the rich never listen, is that they constantly groused about the high cost of living — indeed, the rich usually complained of being poor. — GTES

It is almost axiomatic that air travel has wished tourists on only the most moth-eaten countries in the world: tourism, never more energetically pursued than in static societies, is usually the mobile rich making a blind blundering visitation on the inert poor. — OPE

Tourists will believe almost anything as long as they are comfortable. — HIO

After a man has made a large amount of money he becomes a bad listener and an impatient tourist. — POH

She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.

— Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (2009)

Departures

There is nothing shocking about leaving home, but rather a slow feeling of gathering sadness as each familiar place flashes by the window, and disappears, and becomes part of the past. Time is made visible, and it moves as the landscape moves. I was shown each second passing as the train belted along, ticking off the buildings with a speed that made me melancholy. — OPE

Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather. — GTES

Frontiers

A mushroom-and-dunghill relationship exists at the frontiers of many unequal countries. — OPE

In the matter of visas and border crossings, the smaller the country the bigger the fuss: like a small policeman directing traffic. — POH A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God. — OPE

Looking across the river, I realized I was looking towards another continent, another country, another world. There were sounds there — music, and not only music but the pip and honk of voices and cars. The frontier was actual: people do things differently there, and looking hard I could see trees outlined by the neon beer signs, a traffic jam, the source of the music. No people, but cars and trucks were evidence of them. Beyond that, past the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo, was a black slope, the featureless, night-haunted republics of Latin America. — OPE

A person who has not crossed an African border on foot has not really entered the country, for the airport in the capital is no more than a confidence trick; the distant border, what appears to be the edge, is the country's central reality. — DSS

Air Travel

There is not much to say about airplane journeys. Anything remarkable must be disastrous, so you define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the food. So you are grateful. The gratitude brings such relief your mind goes blank, which is appropriate, for the airplane passenger is a time traveler. He crawls into a carpeted tube that is reeking of disinfectant; he is strapped in to go home, or away. Time is truncated, or in any case warped: he leaves in one time zone and emerges in another. And from the moment he steps into the tube and braces his knees on the seat in front, uncomfortably upright — from the moment he departs, his mind is focused on arrival. That is, if he has any sense at all. If he looked out of the window he would see nothing but the tundra of the cloud layer, and above is empty space. Time is brilliantly blinded: there is nothing to see. This is the reason so many people are apologetic about taking planes. They say, "What I'd really like to do is forget these plastic jumbos and get a three-masted schooner and just stand there on the poop deck with the wind in my hair." — OPE

Airplanes have dulled and desensitized us; we are encumbered, like lovers in a suit of armor. — OPE

Airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked. — GTES

Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's, even to the chairs. — FAF

A train journey is travel; everything else — planes especially — is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands. — GRB

The Return Journey

In any kind of travel there is a good argument for going back and verifying your impressions. Perhaps you were a little hasty in judging the place? Perhaps you saw it in a good month? Something in the weather might have sweetened your disposition? In any case, travel is frequently a matter of seizing the moment. And it is personal. Even if I were traveling with you, your trip would not be mine. — RIR

Travel is a transition, and at its best is a journey that begins with setting forth from home. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease with which a person could be transported so swiftly from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That

was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back. — DSS

One of the greatest rewards of travel is the return home to the reassurance of family and old friends, familiar sights and homely comforts and your own bed. — HIO