Travel disappoints:
The world's big for weary feet,
But smaller than the heart.
Perhaps I should more properly have said 'holidays'. There's an ephemerality and triviality about a holiday that robs it of any real sense of adventure or discovery. With proper 'travel', there may not be any definite destination, and certainly no firm end date: you are removing yourself from your familiar world in order to fully experience another.
Holidays are like the micro-blogging version of the true travel experience.
I've realised I don't want a holiday. I want to bring an end to my current life, and walk all the way back to England.
Yes, there are major issues of practicality. I am pondering them.
2 comments:
One of my favorite literary genres is called something like the "travel essay" (Jan Morris, Bruce Chatwin, Bill Bryson, Paul Theroux, et al.). (Wow, looking at that list just now -- so many Brits!) I've actually traveled, or holidayed, very little in my life; reading the saga of someone's hike across the mountains and rivers and around strange city streets is exquisite vicarious pleasure for me.
The half-joking tone of your last paragraph, I hope, masks some true pondering. That would be a classic travelogue, especially if it somehow covered the broad range of preoccupations you pursue both here and at The Barstool!
Well, the original idea for Barstool Blues (or the original inspiration for that title, anyway) was a bar-themed travelogue (inspired in turn by a book given to me by my university buddy The Mothman, a great favourite of his, All The Girls [attempt to find a link on Amazon thwarted by the agonisingly slow connection speed I have today], which was a biographical memoir by a chap who had become obsessed with prostitutes as a teenager and later had the idea of 'sleeping his way around the world' and writing a travel book about all the brothels he'd visited in different countries).
Just lately, though, I have been craving something more adventuresome. The idea of a Long Walk Home is gaining purchase in my mind.
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