lateralsymmetry:
“Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.”
— Cynthia Ozick
Man, I can’t get enough of these lit quotes + pop culture screenshots blogs. Intertextuality!
The main thing the traveler carries about with her is herself. There’s my home, and then the world: the sea is much stronger than the anchor. I’ve acted wherever I’ve alighted like a guest for life, or, when at my best, as in that line from Purgatorio: We are pilgrims, as you are.
—
Jim Shepard, “The Track of the Assassins” (from You Think That’s Bad)
Saw Shepard read at Joe’s Pub last night. Last time was 3 years ago at Brookline Booksmith. He’s still my favorite short story writer.
Those clarities detached us, gave us form,
Made us like architecture. Now no more
Bemused by local mist, our edges blurred,
We knew where we began and ended. There
We were the campanile and the dome
Alive and separate in that bell-struck air,
Climate whose light reformed our random line,
Edged our intent and sharpened our desire.
Could it be always so: a week of sunlight,
Walks with a guidebook picking out our way
Through verbs and ruins, yet finding after all
The promised vista, once!—The light has changed
Before we can make it ours. We have no choice:
We are only tourists under that blue sky,
Reading the posters on the station wall:
Come, take a walking-trip through happiness.
There is a mystery that floats between
The tourist and the town. Imagination
Estranges it from her. She need not suffer
Or die here. It is none of her affair,
Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.
Her bargains with disaster have been sealed
In another country. Here she goes untouched,
And this is alienation. Only sometimes,
In certain towns she opens certain letters
Forwarded on from bitter origins,
That send her walking, sick and haunted, through
Mysterious and ordinary streets
That are no more than streets to walk and walk—
And then the tourist and the town are one.
To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery: the Rathaus fountain,
The skaters in the sunset on the lake
At Salzburg, or, emerging after snow,
The singular clear stars of Castellane.
To work and suffer is to come to know
The angles of a room, light in a square,
As convalescents learn the face of one
Who has watched beside them. Yours now, every street,
The noonday swarm across the bridge, the bells
Bruising the air above the crowded roofs,
The avenue of chestnut-trees, the road
To the post-office. Once upon a time
All these for you were fiction. Now, made free
You live among them. Your breath is on this air,
And you are theirs and of their mystery.
- Adrienne Rich
(Source: jamielynnbuehner.blogspot.com)
“TRAVEL, like life, is best understood backward but must be experienced forward, to paraphrase Kierkegaard. After decades of wandering, only now does a pattern emerge. I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places.
It is, admittedly, an odd term. One could be forgiven for thinking that thin places describe skinny nations (see Chile) or perhaps cities populated by thin people (see Los Angeles). No, thin places are much deeper than that. They are locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine, or the transcendent or, as I like to think of it, the Infinite Whatever.
Travel to thin places does not necessarily lead to anything as grandiose as a “spiritual breakthrough,” whatever that means, but it does disorient. It confuses. We lose our bearings, and find new ones. Or not. Either way, we are jolted out of old ways of seeing the world, and therein lies the transformative magic of travel.”
This article is great. I’m surprised he doesn’t mention Invisible Cities—Calvino uses “Thin Cities” as one of his categories for his vignettes.
![thedailywhat:
Inspirational Motivational of the Day: Yesterday afternoon, British badass Felicity Aston successfully completed her treacherous 59-day trek across Antarctica, becoming the first woman to solo-ski the length of the continent’s icy terrain.
Armed with nothing but a pair of skis, a pair of poles, and her arms, Aston dragged two sledges across 1,084 miles from Leverett Glacier to Hercules Inlet. “When I saw the coastal mountains that marked my end point for the first time, I literally just stopped in my tracks and bawled my eyes out,” Aston said.
A meteorologist by trade, the 34-year-old Kentish woman had been tweeting her record-setting schlep. “Just in case I was in danger of feeling sentimental, a violent wind has appeared from nowhere and is beating the tent like the bad old days,” she wrote her followers while awaiting a lift back to base camp after crossing the finish line.
Speaking of the hardships she endured along the way, Aston said the “mental side” was tougher than the physical side. “Being alone sounds like such a simple thing, but when was the last time you spent a whole day without seeing any person?”
[ap / guardian / @felicity_aston.]
New hero.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lybxguvLQK1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
View Larger thedailywhat:
Inspirational Motivational of the Day: Yesterday afternoon, British badass Felicity Aston successfully completed her treacherous 59-day trek across Antarctica, becoming the first woman to solo-ski the length of the continent’s icy terrain.
Armed with nothing but a pair of skis, a pair of poles, and her arms, Aston dragged two sledges across 1,084 miles from Leverett Glacier to Hercules Inlet. “When I saw the coastal mountains that marked my end point for the first time, I literally just stopped in my tracks and bawled my eyes out,” Aston said.
A meteorologist by trade, the 34-year-old Kentish woman had been tweeting her record-setting schlep. “Just in case I was in danger of feeling sentimental, a violent wind has appeared from nowhere and is beating the tent like the bad old days,” she wrote her followers while awaiting a lift back to base camp after crossing the finish line.
Speaking of the hardships she endured along the way, Aston said the “mental side” was tougher than the physical side. “Being alone sounds like such a simple thing, but when was the last time you spent a whole day without seeing any person?”
[ap / guardian / @felicity_aston.]
New hero.
This song always automatically starts playing in my head when I’m on a plane that’s taking off.
View Larger Travel Kit - Committing random acts of travel
Fancy yourself an adventurous traveler? How about upping the stakes and letting chance determine everything from where you go to what you do when you get there?
That’s the idea behind Zufall, a new app that distills the oft-tedious process of travel planning into a simple roll of the digital dice.
Developed by Valerie McTavish and Tim Wohlberg of Kelowna, B.C., Zufall (German for “chance” or “coincidence”) invites users to input a direction, travel time or distance and preferred activity. Shake your phone like you’re at the craps table and the on-screen dice will create a map with a fan-shaped “target zone” showing you where to head and what you’ll find.
For McTavish and Wohlberg, the app is the latest iteration of a commitment to random travel born on their first date. Deciding to go camping, but “crippled by indecision,” as McTavish puts it, they flipped a coin every time they had to make a choice — north or south, east or west, which way at forks in the road, this or that campsite.
“We never regretted a single decision because we never made one,” said McTavish.
“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” - Kurt Vonnegut
![thedailywhat:
Inspirational Motivational of the Day: Yesterday afternoon, British badass Felicity Aston successfully completed her treacherous 59-day trek across Antarctica, becoming the first woman to solo-ski the length of the continent’s icy terrain.
Armed with nothing but a pair of skis, a pair of poles, and her arms, Aston dragged two sledges across 1,084 miles from Leverett Glacier to Hercules Inlet. “When I saw the coastal mountains that marked my end point for the first time, I literally just stopped in my tracks and bawled my eyes out,” Aston said.
A meteorologist by trade, the 34-year-old Kentish woman had been tweeting her record-setting schlep. “Just in case I was in danger of feeling sentimental, a violent wind has appeared from nowhere and is beating the tent like the bad old days,” she wrote her followers while awaiting a lift back to base camp after crossing the finish line.
Speaking of the hardships she endured along the way, Aston said the “mental side” was tougher than the physical side. “Being alone sounds like such a simple thing, but when was the last time you spent a whole day without seeing any person?”
[ap / guardian / @felicity_aston.]
New hero.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lybxguvLQK1qzpwi0o1_1280.jpg)
