'Nomads Who Freely Move Between Cultures'

When I was young there wasn’t a place on Earth I didn’t want to visit, even Albania or Las Vegas. That’s a conventional sentiment. Young people are romantics by nature. Their appetite for experience is insatiable and their knowledge of the world is rooted in happy ignorance. Only with age do we mature into dull pragmatism. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve lived in five states, visited most of the others, been to Canada and Mexico, and travelled to Europe three times. Some people vow to make a pilgrimage before they die to some cherished spot in the world. I haven’t, though I would like at least once to visit England, my literary homeland, to see where Swift, Johnson, George Eliot and other giants walked. Kinga Anna Gajda writes of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert in “A Nomadic Writer”:

“Human beings are nomads who freely move between cultures. They are open to the world, and curious. Being such a nomad himself, Herbert was absorbing everything that was of interest to him. He was inspired by everything that was foreign and wanted to get to know the unknown, all to better understand the reality and consciously accept it or refute it. For these reasons, Herbert toured Greece, Italy, France, England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia.”

One of my favorite travel books -- up there with Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), Evelyn Waugh’s Labels (1930) and A.J. Liebling’s Normandy Revisited (1958) -- is Herbert’s Barbarian in the Garden (Polish edition, 1962; English, 1985). The collection of essays is based on Herbert’s travels to France and Italy from his native Poland in the late 50’s and early 60’s. Herbert was history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. Herbert was an erudite traveler in space and time. Gajda quotes him as saying:

“The Judeo-Greek-Roman tradition really interests me. I cannot study Persian or Indian cultures, which for sure are great too. I was born and raised in this culture and would like to maintain – as much as my small abilities, strength and talent allow – these ties that once were connecting Poland with Ferrara, Prague, Bologna, Heidelberg or Oxford.”

In Barbarian in the Garden, Herbert is almost giddy with the history that suffuses everything he sees. My closest experience has been numerous visits to Civil War battlefields – Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. Such places are haunted. The ideal experience combines physical presence with a deep grounding in the literature.