The Tourist and the Pilgrim

But there is another kind of restlessness that can be experienced on the road, a fatigue that stems from knowing where home is but also realizing you’re not there yet—a kind of “directed” impatience.25 The first is a baseline aimlessness that keeps looking for home; the second is the weariness of being en route, burdened by trials and distracted by

These glimpses are fleeting, and they fade as quickly as they come into view. Sometimes, in the distance between these moments, we are given to wonder if we made it all up. As life begins to fill with losses and disappointments, missed yardsticks of progress, and endless responsibilities, years and even decades can evaporate without so much as a pe

there is something to be said for the value of not merely passing through the world, but also making some effort to capture it—if only because in trying to capture it, one gets in the habit of noticing, and appreciating.

A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract,

“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]

The English (as Pritchett reminds me) have long excelled at a distinctive form of travel writing—the article that’s less notable for what a writer extracts from a place than for what the place extracts from him. New sights touch off thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t have entered the writer’s mind.

By instilling this sense of transience, Knausgaard seeks to awaken his own attention and the attention of his readers. He wants to counteract habit: to prevent himself from taking his life for granted and see the world anew. This attempt to break with habit—to deepen the sensation of being alive, to make moments of time more vivid—is necessarily in

Even today many travellers leave home not just to see new places, but also to see the whole of the place they have left from the various kinds of distance – cultural, physical, linguistic – that travel opens for them. Indeed, a fascination with this perspective is something I associate with the most experienced travellers.