'The Soul of a Journey Is Liberty'

Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words:

“When a moment comes that my body will have only enough strength to fix the pillow under the head, I will have no choice but write a large piece of work, that is a book and not a collection of drafts, which will be titled: Introduction to the theory of journey.”

 

Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Herbert, permission to travel from Poland to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of his poem “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):

 

“If you set out on a journey let it be long

 a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

 so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch

 so you can confront the world with your whole skin”

 

Like Montaigne, Herbert was gifted with restlessness and curiosity, essential qualities for an ambitious traveler or writer. As a result, he is one of the last century’s essential poets and “travel writers” – a dubious category, given the amount of junk published in the travel genre. His essay collection The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) documents those early travels outside Poland. Herbert was always history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist Bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. He was an erudite traveler in space and time.

 

In the essay quoted above, Herbert is writing of Montaigne’s Travel Journal, the Frenchman’s account of his wanderings through Germany, Switzerland and Italy between June 1580 and November 1581. He sought relief from the pain of kidney stones and visited numerous spas with mineral baths. Herbert writes of him: “Montaigne was more sensitive to the odd, the ingenious, the technically innovative, than to things of beauty. He doesn’t omit to mention a single curiosity he encounters. . . . He listens. He listens to everyone and everything.” Remarkable how the qualities of the best travelers and the best writers are nearly identical.

 

Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The resulting essays chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture by a man temporarily liberated from the bleak, vulgar constraints of Soviet-era Poland. Unlike Montaigne, Herbert revels in the inherited art and architecture of Europe.

 

Herbert begins his essay “Lascaux” (Barbarian in the Garden) with a spirited, unexpected digression: “Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.” This is a man temporarily freed from the grim, gray strictures of post-Stalinist Poland. He devotes the next two paragraphs to an entertaining account of truffle history and gastronomy. Herbert suggests that we “not envy Monsieur Montaigne, in whose undercarriage the sand [of kidney stones] sang somniferously, monotonously, and long.”

 

Herbert died on July 28, 1998 at age seventy-three.

 

[The Montaigne essay is found in The Collected Prose: 1948-1998 (trans. Alissa Valles, Ecco, 2010).]

 

[ADDENDUM: I was later reminded of William Hazlitt’s essay “On Going a Journey”: “The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters . . .”]