“Oh East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” But few recall that the lines that conclude the refrain, just a few syllables later, exclaim, “But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth. When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”

Whenever we recall the places we have seen, we tend to observe them in the late afternoon glow of nostalgia, after memory, the mind’s great cosmetician, has softened the rough edges, smoothed out imperfections and removed the whole to a lovely abstract distance. Just as a good man, once dead, is remembered as a saint, so a pleasant place, once quit, is recalled as utopia. Nothing is ever what it used to be.

No man, they say, is an island; in the age of international travel, not even an island can remain an island for long.

I went to Asia, then, not only to see Asia, but also to see America from a different vantage point and with new eyes. I left one kind of home to find another: to discover what resided in me and where I resided most fully, and so to better appreciate — in both senses of the word — the home I had left. The point was made best by one great traveler who saw the world without ever leaving home, and, indeed, created a home that was a world within — Thoreau: “Our journeying is a great-circle sailing.”

These days, indeed, the facts of Kew were the facts of Kathmandu. Communications had sent the world spinning around so fast that every wheel came around full circle. Travel far enough East and you quickly end up in the West; go across the globe and you’d find that you had never left home at all.

It often seemed, in fact, that the principal aim of every Overland journey was nothing, really, but an exhaustive knowledge of suffering (and not, alas, in the Buddhist sense); hard-core Travelers felt “close to the natives” only when they were actually close to death. And so the litanies continued. “it took us thirty hours to get there by truck from Golmud.” “Oh, that’s nothing. It took me thirty-six hours, and the driver only stopped once for food, and we all got food poisoning, and for the rest of the trip everyone was vomiting on the bumpy road.” No sweat, man: it took me seventeen days by road from Chengdu — and that was by post office truck.

For if it is the first vanity, and goal, of every traveler to come upon his own private pocket of perfection, it is his second vanity and goal to shut the door behind him.

“Isn’t Bali spoiled?” is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler . . . meaning, is the island overrun by tourists?” wrote Miguel Coverrubias. He had written that in 1937.

The romance with the foreign must certainly be leavened with a spirit of keen and unillusioned realism; but it must also be observed with a measure of faith.

“After living in Asia,” John Kirch quotes an old hand as saying, “you trust nobody, but you believe in everything.”

“Ye visions of the hills! And Souls of lonely places!” sang Wordsworth, who found all his solace and scripture in his loneliness, and saw in it purity and a return to buried over divinity. . . . . Everyone longs at times to get away from it all. Finding a sanctuary, a place apart from time, is not so different from finding a faith.

So travel at heart is just a quick way of keeping our minds mobile and awake.

Travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination.

It is not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you).

None of them [the great travel writers] was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

And that is why many of us travel in search not of answers but of better questions.

Travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move. One the road we often live more simply, with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown but the unknowing: I at least travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self.

But the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year — or at least forty-five hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other . . . . And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: it shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldome have cause to visit.

Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import — and export — dreams with tenderness.

Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.

If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism).

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light and from a crooked angle.

I like the emphasis on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them . . . . Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship — both my own, which I need to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly and yet feeling it truly.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down, to get taken in, and fall in love once more.

Travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keep our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, heir to Emerson and Thoreau, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

If the great horror of traveling is that the foreign can come to seem so drearily familiar, the happy surprise of traveling is that the familiar can come to seem wondrously exotic.