We travel for …
In The View from Castle Rock Alice Munro, the narrator says: “I lived in a state of siege, obsessed with the constant fear of losing what I most wanted to hold on to. When I was traveling, however, the problem disappeared… and the scattered pieces would quietly fall back into place within me. The essential lines of the drawing would re-form. And that made me optimistic and happy. I felt like a spectator. A spectator rather than a guard.”
I have spent almost my entire life on alert, keeping watch: first over the outside world, and then, for a certain period between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, over the inside as well. Which is decidedly more exhausting.
But not when traveling. Traveling is packing away the fear of ending—the fear of discovering oneself useless and finished, the fear of nothingness: no home, no family, no meaning, no attachments, no love, only steps forward.
The fear of failure, of making a fool of oneself. Because travel, always cloaked in the promise of discovery, offers us each time the possibility of a new take—a new scene—that allows us to return to our starting point richer and more inspired, and just a little less diminished.
Click here for the Italian version
