How is it that travel can be so rapturous? Fittingly, this dream of traveling descended on me toward the end of high school, around the same time I decided I would be a writer, around the same time that I began looking at religion. Doubtless they are all part of a single, mystical mix.
In college I had to be Jack Kerouac. The first year I took off alone, driving to the other coast and back. So much quiet, so much hurry. The exhilaration came, as it always comes, only at the cheating moments. The first moments, which pretend to represent all the rest. The exhilaration pulls me out. I wanted to find the best place in the whole country. But after a month, returning home to old Arlington, there was no place I would rather have been.
Again it has come for me, so many times. To Athens, London, Tunis, Paris, Rome, Chennai, San Cristobal, Istanbul, Amman. And more pointedly, even, in this land. Salt Lake, Santa Barbara, Grand Junction, Berryville, New Orleans, Los Vegas, Seattle, and everything in between.
Today it is a small trip, out from New York by train up to Providence to speak on a panel at Brown. Then to Boston, where some friends are, and by Sunday, back home. But the freeing feeling, more excellent than anything, comes anyway. Then it goes inevitably, a fleeting freedom. And when it flees, there you are in a foreign place alone.
It’s just like that clever Nazi said: “that which frees—the mystery—is concealed and always concealing itself.” The trickster of traveling.
Comments
7 responses to “The Trickster of Traveling”
A quote comes to mind: “I love to travel, but hate to arrive,” said Einstein. Some of my most vivid travel memories have been borne of destinations passed-through, as opposed to actual endpoints. After a long afternoon training through the green and golden Rhine river valley, dark-bricked Cologne came across as much more static than stately.
Have an excellent trip!
Ah yes!
The best account of travel I remember reading. I often wonder where is the best place to live for a poet, writer, artist, spiritual person? I often look on the back of a book jacket of any book I like to see where the writer lives. Perhaps it is a complicated micro-environment that makes it work,
Actually, I used to drive myself totally crazy obsessing about where I was writing. I would feel like I could write only when the conditions were 100% ideal. It was later hugely liberating to decide that, actually, writing is what I do and must do and I’ll do it wherever I damn well please.
Of course, though, place matters. As I wrote here, and oh boy it’s true, “it matters that I’m in New York.”
This is a great entry. And you totally capture well the paradox of traveling–that sense of freedom giving way to loneliness. I think writing while traveling is also an interesting change. It’s almost like your sense of place is sharper when you’re just encountering it-but also deceptive because you’re encountering the shiny new surface rather than any depths. Have fun in Providence!
I dream of journeys repeatedly
-Theodore Roethke
Hey Nathan,
In an interesting coincidence, I plan to travel in a train around the US this June as I transition from school back to the work-world to better see the vast expanses that make up America. A friend emailed me an article about train travel from the NYT: https://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/travel/08amtrak.html?emc=eta1
Enjoy!
Fatima
This is a great link. Thank you!