'The Grand Object of Travelling'

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.”