Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

An Essay on India is not just an account of eight months of travel. It is a defense of travel as a form, perhaps the most important form, of humanistic education.

A travel book is like a poem in giving universal significance to a local texture.

A reading of Maugham also set Alec Waugh on this traveling career. “Were the South Seas really like that?” he wondered in the summer of 1926 after reading The Moon and sixpence and The Trembling leaf. “I had to find out for myself. I bought a round the world ticket that included Tahiti,” and “I have been on the move ever since.”

Gerald Brenan’s mental landscape was formed, he reports, not just by the romances of William Morris, with their “descriptions of imaginary travel,” but also by Elisee Reclus’s Universal Geography in nineteen volumes, which he discovered in school. From Reclus he gathered that “foreign countries alone offered something to the imagination,” and he filled notebooks with a plan for a tour of the world “which would last, with continuous traveling, some thirty years.”

One travels to experience the past, and travel is thus an adventure in time as well as distance.

For the literary imagination, says Auden, “it is impossible to take a train or an airplane without having a fantasy of oneself as a Quest Hero setting off in search of an enchanted princess or the Waters of Life.”

Listening to the ship’s engine as he sets out from Southampton for Spain, V.S. Prichett writes in Marching Spain (1928), “every man who heard those sounds must have seemed to himself as great a hero as Ulysses and pitted against as mysterious a destiny, the strange destiny of the outward bound.”

One could ask: aren’t travel books really romances in the old sense, with the difference that the adventures are located within an actual, often famous, topography to satisfy an audience which demands it both ways—which wants to go adventuring vicariously, as it always has, but which at the same time wants to feel itself within a world declared real by such up-to-date studies as political science, sociology, anthropology, economics, and contemporary history?

The speaker in any travel book exhibits himself as physically more free than the reader, and thus every such book, even when it depicts its speaker trapped by Boa Vista, is an implicit celebration of freedom. It resembles a poetic code, an Ode to Freedom.

A travel book, at its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders, and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

One “senior survivor from the Edwardian era” was once heard by Jeffrey Amherst uttering the view that ’abroad’ was a beastly place and all foreigners buggers.”

But the traveler’s world is not the ordinary one, for travel itself, even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly.

In the seventeenth century the travel book was so commonly regarded as a repository of wonderful lies that in 1630 Captain John Smith felt obliged to modify the word Travels with the word True when he published The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captain John Smith.

The achievement is no small part of the gift Frieda said “he [D.H. Lawrence] gave in his writing to his fellow men, . . . the hope of more and more life.”

To Lawrence, educated by the Etruscans, death seems even “the wonder-journey of life,” the final travel of a man conceived as by nature a traveler. The Etruscan instinct for the imagery of travel surfaces even on their alabaster funerary ash-chests, with their repeated motif of the dead setting off gaily in covered wagons. “This,” says Lawrence, “is surely the journey of the soul.” He can interpret so boldly because he is writing “a travel book,” that is, a book about himself in relation to unfamiliar stimuli.

[D.H. Lawrence] “What does one care?” Lawrence concludes. “What does one care for precept and mental dictation? Is there not the massive, brilliant outflilnging recklessness in the male soul, summed up in the sudden word: Andiamo! Andiamo! Let us go on. Andiamo! – let us go to hell knows where, but let us go on.” Sea and Sardinia could be said to celebrate sheer kinesis, and to that degree it is at the center of Lawrence’s whole enterprise.

[D.H. Lawrence] “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” It is moving and freedom and the delight of feeling your own feet in contract with the road that this book is about, not Sardinia, although Lawrence now and then asserts his formal interest in “creative spontaneity” and related primitivistic themes . . .

[D.H. Lawrence] “Don’t expect to catch on there, either,” he writes Brewster. “But I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.” Tahiti, once he gets there, is a let-down, “very pretty to look at,” he tells Mary Cannan, “but I don’t want to stay, not one bit. . . . Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion – chiefly that.”

If he needs the curiosity to propel him abroad, he needs the energy to rebound from disillusion.

Like Robert Byron, he has the true traveler’s high-metabolic equipment to sustain his boundless curiosity and the boundless energy feeding it.

The idea that one might go away, that one might try again, defines a repeated emotional action Lawrence performs, and his elasticity and power of recovery and capacity to rise Phoenix-like from calamity and despair are among the most striking things about him.

Like Joyce and Robert Graves and Norman Douglas and Isherwood and Pound and Eliot, Lawrence was an exile, and his life was virtually a series of impatient acts of travel, to Germany and Italy, to Sardinia and Switzerland and France, to Ceylon and Australia and France again. “This place is no good,” he kept saying as he moved on.

Asked once what makes life worth living, Connolly thought carefully and then answered, “There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party for six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.”

“To travel in Europe,” he [Byron] writes, “is to assume a foreseen inheritance; in Islam, to inspect that of a close and familiar cousin. But to travel in farther Asia is to discover a novelty previously unsuspected and unimaginable. It is not a question of probing this novelty, of analyzing its sociological, artistic, or religious origins, but of learning, simply, that it exists. Suddenly, as it were in the opening of an eye, the potential world – the field of man and his environment – is doubly extended.

“As member of a community and heir to a culture,” Byron writes, “whose joint worth is now in dispute, I would discover what ideas, if those of the West be inadequate, can with greater advantage be found to guide the world.” And now he goes on to justify travel as a form of knowledge, and to do so by recourse to traditional British assumptions about the primacy of sense experience. Among men of all types, “the traveling species,” he says, is distinguished from others by a quest for “an organic harmony between all matter and all activity, whose discovery is the purpose of their lives.” When this impulse intensifies until it resembles “a spiritual necessity, then travel must rank with the more serious forms of endeavor. Admittedly there are other ways of making the world’s acquaintance. But the traveler is a slave to his senses; his grasp of a fact can only be complete when reinforced by sensory evidence; he can know the world, in fact, only when he sees, hears, and smells it.” Hence the traveler’s “craving for personal reconnaissance.” The traveler can de defined as a hypertrophied freak of British empiricism.

A convention of the travel books of the 20’s and 30’s is for the traveler to pay his respects to the Great War by implicitly recalling that time when travel was impossible, or when “going abroad” was a murderous parody of the real thing.

Sensing their predicament and understanding the urgency of their precious images of compensation, we will find nothing absurd in Chapman’s intense, irrational happiness in travel, even though he says, “I suppose there is something absurd about the intense happiness I get out of the simples travel abroad.” His reason is simple and sufficient: “I must say I enjoy being alive.”

The fantasies of flight and freedom which animate the imagination of the 20’s and 30’s and generate its pervasive images of travel can be said to begin in the trenches [of WW I].

. . . the compensatory appeal of the sun-warmed, free, lively world elsewhere, mockingly out of reach of those entrenched and immobile, apparently forever, in the smelly freezing mud of Picardy and Flanders.

Travel itself, even the most commonplace, is an implicit quest for anomaly. . . .

We are all tourists now, and there is no escape.