Traveling In Circles

This blog entry proved far more challenging to write than most others. It’s not that I lacked the words; no, it’s that I have too many. The subject is travel. My wanderlust is an ineradicable, essential impulse within me. My travels have shaped me, informed me and transformed me. There is simply too much to say…too much ground to cover, if you will. I tried to distill my thoughts to a pithy few.

I merely confused myself.

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It all started with a poem. Strike that. It started during a number of late night conversations with friends, both old and new. Our conversations roamed far and wide; matters of the heart, mostly, and…invariably…talk turned to tales of travels.

I have a restless heart, as do my closest friends. We’ve all been known to range far from home, often alone. As a consequence of these twilight reminiscences, I began pondering my wanderlust. This particular poem immediately sprang to mind. It’s another one of my personal favorites. It’s accompanied me from monument to monument, museum to museum, cathedral to cathedral. It’s truth grows ever more luminous with age and experience.


STATUES
By Kathleen Raine

They more than we are what we are:
Serenity and joy
We lost or never found,
The forms of heart’s desire,
We gave them what we could not keep;
We made them what we cannot be.

Their kingdom is our dream, but who can say
If they or we
Are dream or dreamer, signet or clay?
If the most perfect be most true,
These faces pure, these bodies posed in thought
Are substance of our form
And we the confused shadows cast.

Growing toward their prime they take our years away,
And from our deaths they rise
Immortal in the life we lose.
The gods consume us, but restore
More than we were:
We love, that they may be,
They are, that we may know.

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As I wrote at the outset, I was prepared to riff at great length about what traveling means to me…what it has done to me. I then went searching for T.S. Elliot’s famous quote as the intended capstone to my “poetic eloquence” (I’m smiling…and, yes…it’s a self-deprecating smile) and discovered the wise words of many. Therefore, this indolent philosopher has decided to take a much-needed short cut.
I think these quotes cover the subject quite nicely. Consider them koans for the foot-weary:

"There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one." Thomas Wolf

“All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost.”
J. R. R. Tolkien

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” Susan Sontag

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
St. Augustine

“Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” Mohammed

“Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” Frank Herbert

”Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain

"Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
Kurt Vonnegut

“I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.” Bill Bryson

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these 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

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” Aldous Huxley

“A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.” Lin Yutang

“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton

“A traveler. I love his title. A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from - toward; it is the history of every one of us. It is a great art to saunter.”
Henry David Thoreau

"Traveling is almost like talking with those of other centuries."
René Descartes

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber

“...travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” Miriam Beard

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.”
Sigmund Freud

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.” George Moore

“The wise man travels to discover himself.” James Russell Lowell

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust

"He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth." Graham Greene

"Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it." Eudora Welty

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." T.S. Elliot

"It is not down in any map; true places never are." Herman Melville

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No doubt, you, the Astute Reader, noticed that the quotes funneled from the general to the specific, from the world at large to a single heart. And that’s how it is with travel, isn’t it? We sail off into the great unknown, learning about life via the “immersion method.” All our travels come full circle. All that we see, touch, taste, hear, experience and feel changes us.

I travel to be awed, humbled, educated, challenged, sated and awakened. This personal trek grows ever more rich and meaningful with the passing of the years. I journey to discover my self.

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