travel
The reason to travel: there are inner transitions we can’t properly cement without a change of locations.
Twitter, April 12, 2010.
The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open.
Moby Dick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.
One day Mr. Mallard decided he’d like to take a trip to see what the rest of the river was like, further on. So off he set.
Make Way for Ducklings (New York: Viking, 1941).
Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involved a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the traveler finds himself reduced to more modest proportions—but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.
Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World (New York: New York Review of Books, 1992), 62.
I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, “Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles.”
“Standing By,” The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 33–35.
Will I ever get home? It is like looking down a tremendous ski jump. The bottom is not so far away in time, but in effort and all one has to give to it, such a mighty jump.
Locked Rooms and Open Doors: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1933–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 127.
Perhaps it goes without saying that I believe in the geographic cure. Of course you can’t out-travel sadness. You will find it has smuggled itself along in your suitcase. It coats the camera lens, it flavors the local cuisine. In that different sunlight, it stands out, awkward, yours, honking in the brash vowels of your native tongue in otherwise quiet restaurants. You may even feel proud of its stubbornness as it follows you up the bell towers and monuments, as it pants in your ear while you take in the view. I travel not to get away from my troubles but to see how they look in front of famous buildings or on deserted beaches. I take them for walks. Sometimes I get them drunk. Back at home we generally understand each other better.
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008), 132.
We continually forgot the two golden rules of argument-free road tripping: eat when hungry; nap when tired.
Summers with Juliet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 49.