What Travel Can, and Cannot, Teach Us

This is what Camus meant when he said that "what gives value to travel is fear" -- disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish... See more

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identica

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1. I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society,

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There are many hopes to travel but perhaps my greatest hope is that it will always serve as a reminder that we live in a vast universe of the unknown with limited minds, that we should always be humbled by our ignorance, and that travel will always possess the capacity to restore us and nudge us to be less presumptuous and more generous and kind to... See more

I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down. The most crucial info about a society is how it feels to be there—the rhythms of street life, where and when people eat meals, how gender works. You can read a million things about Japan without knowing the bodily experience of walking around in a truly high-trust society,... See more

traveling “reminds me how large and varied the world is. It reminds me that my concerns are so narrow: different countries have their own daily dramas, their own political issues, their own worries and aspirations… It’s wonderful to be outside of my comfort zone and remember how little of the world I actually experience.”