Why We Travel

And… back. I’ve spent the last nine days on vacation, and while it wasn’t exactly relaxing, it did give me the space and distance needed to explore some things from a new perspective. I spent some time reading, of course: Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle and John Grisham’s The Associate. (Both were funny -- and frightening -- for very different reasons.)

But neither book really preoccupied my mind: instead, I kept thinking about why people travel. One of my favorite fiction passages is from Kissing in Manhattan by David Schickler. Here, the narrator is describing Rally McWilliams, a travel writer living in New York. (As a caveat, I am cutting off the passage shamelessly for my purposes.)

“Rally was obsessed with what made people wonderful. It was usually what she least expected, but she knew the truth when she found it. In Dublin she’d hoped to meet blue-eyed men, raconteurs who would buy her pints and tell her stories. Instead, it was the Irishwomen who fascinated Rally, the young ones with babies, or the ones with pale skin and cigarettes. In Montana, Rally had talked to countless cowboys – men with blue jeans and money – hoping to sniff out the spirit of the West for a piece she was writing. But it was in Glacier National Park, listening to a park ranger named Russ, a little barrel of a fellow with a lisp, that Rally felt the stubborn inconsequence of men in the wild. What startled Rally, and kept her traveling, was this: when the wonder of an individual human being struck her.”

It’s not why I travel – that’s a whole other post, eventually – but I thought it was a beautiful meditation on why people travel.

Reading According to Travel Plans

I recently decided that I would start choosing pre-vacation book selections around my travel destination. So before I went to Stockholm, based on Quentin's recommendation, I read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." Not only was it a great book, but it heightened my experience of Sweden: as we wandered the streets of Gamla Stan, I was struck by a sense of familiarity, since I had already read about them.

So now it's twelve hours until my trip, and I've packed one book relating to Italy... but I'm looking for a second. Recommendations, anyone?

Eat, Pray, Love

I didn't expect to like "Eat, Pray, Love." I picked it up a few days before a month-long trip, and in my sleep-deprived, angst-ridden, post-Bar-exam state, I was too tired to research something I actually wanted to read. Instead, standing in the airport bookshop, I had a vague recollection that Hillary Clinton had mentioned reading it, and so I threw it in my bag for my travels through Spain.

You know where this is going. I devoured it. Multiple times, actually. Every morning, I would bore everyone with the passages I had read the night before, insisting on reading them out loud. There were so many passages that spoke to me, but one in particular resonates at this moment:

"The Bhagavad Gita - that ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly." Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert)

Could there be a higher goal than that?

I Was Amelia Earhart

I finished I Was Amelia Earhart earlier this week. I picked it up on a whimsy, but the first page had me hooked...

"As far back as she could remember, she always wanted to be a heroine... Not on a screen in a dusty vaudeville house, but out in the real world. The painted goddesses ruling countries and fighting wars weren't at all like the women she knew. The women she knew did what men expected of them. Heroines, they did whatever they wanted. They smoked cigarettes on horseback under silken skies. They carried guns and had a multitude of lovers. She was seduced by the vision of an imaginary world where women led extraordinary lives..." I Was Amelia Earhart (Jane Mendelsohn)

Why I Read

I've been reading for over twenty years now. It's an integral part of who I am: books have shaped my life, exposing me to new ideas, new places, new people. It's also one of my deepest joys. A good book can leave me buoyant -- and a depressing book can leave me in a funk for days. I often laugh as I read, and occasionally, I cry. On more than one occasion, I've been known to stay up until some unholy hour, because I'm so enthralled in a book that I simply can not put it down.

But, most importantly, I find that books make me re-evaluate my own life. When well-written, a passage can cause an "ah ha!" moment, where it resonates so deeply that I start thinking about my life, the world, human nature.

The problem, of course, is that I'll read the passages, reflect on them, and then forget where I read it! I'm hoping that this blog can be my space to journal the passages (and, on occasion, my reflections on them). I hope that you enjoy the selections!