Youth has a way of discounting practical objections to the grandest of schemes, as though Utopia could be wished into existence. There’s charm to such naïveté, and who would intentionally crush the dreams of young people? The bitterest among the formerly young, perhaps.
At age nineteen I planned
to move to Ireland. As yet, I had no passport, no college degree, no steady
income, no savings and no marketable skills. My fantasy was rooted in books – Swift,
Joyce, Yeats. The great ones lived there, so it’s time to move. That faded with
the arrival of a warning letter from Selective Service, which shifted my travel
plans to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I buckled down at school, the threat faded
and I moved one small step closer to adulthood. The great Colombian aphorist Nicolás
Gómez Dávila, known as Don Colacho, writes:
“When the desire for other
places, other centuries, awakens in us, it is not really in this or that time,
in this or that country, where we desire to live, but in the very phrases of
the writer who knew how to speak to us of that country or that time.”
It’s probably best to
avoid books marketed as “Travel.” Most are written by non-writers for
non-travelers, and often turn out to be non-books. Yet, some of the best writers,
often better known for other sorts of writing, have written the best books of
travel. Among them: Herodotus, Boswell, Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry James, Chekhov, Evelyn
Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert, V.S. Naipaul and
Marius Kociejowski.
I’ve just read Fabled
Shore: From the Pyrenees to Portugal (1949) by Rose Macaulay. It’s not in
quite the same league as books by the previously named writers, but it feeds an
old, youthfully romantic interest in the Mediterranean region. In the wake of
the Spanish Civil War, Macaulay travels along the Catalonian, Valencian,
Andalusian and Algrave coast. Another, better book that stirs similar longings
is Ford Madox Ford’s Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine (1935). As
one of her epigraphs, Macaulay uses a remark by Dr. Johnson reported by
Boswell:
“The grand object of
travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean.”
Do you have an opinion regarding Richard Halliburton, the travel writer from the early 20th century? I was somewhat enamored by his books as a young teenager in the middle 1960s.
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