I always manage to forget the immense toll travel takes on the body. After flying across the ocean, staying awake for over twenty four hours, I am shocked that my body doesn’t know what to do with itself. The nausea and the fever which have been the unfortunate and unignorable reality of my first 48 hours at home. Whether exhaustion or some obscure pathogen is making me feel this, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I feel this way and continue to travel anyway. This kind of miserable, total-body exhaustion does not deter me from wanting to travel again as soon as I can. The body says no, but the soul says yes.
Travelling is a luxury in terms of expense, but it is different from most other luxuries in that, when done right, its purpose is to push one outside of their comfort zone. I indulged in some luxury in Paris and London: fancy meals, 10 euro cups of hot chocolate, et cetera. But it wasn’t these things that really made the trip for me. It was the burning feeling in the front of my calves after a long day walking the winding streets, and the callouses on my feet, which ended up feeling like the point of the trip. The times when I did get to sit back and look at the sky were made so much better by the constant movement, by the glorious fatigue of this project.
I don’t sleep well the night before travelling. Whether I have to board a plane or train, or get behind the wheel and drive, some ineffable restlessness comes over me. I don’t know if it’s a feeling of excitement or nervousness, but I just can’t sleep. Thousands of miles crossed with blinding speed, over hardly enough time for the mind to understand just how big this world is. It is the knowledge that life, temporarily, will change in enormous and unpredictable ways, which precludes me from sleep. There is a great precipice with every mile, and I must close my eyes and trust that my stride is long enough to cross each one.
“Quo Vadis?” An apocryphal bit of scripture quoted on an advertisement in the window of the luggage store on the Rue de Passy puts it so succinctly: “Where are you going?” This phrase, used here to embody travel, does not entail pleasure or luxury, but pain. Christ responds to Peter’s question, “I am going to Rome, to be crucified again.” The most significant long-distance route in Les Miserables is Jean Valjean’s journey from Montreuil-sur-Mer to the court in Arras. Jean Valjean, quo vadis? He goes back to the court, to be crucified again. I know this seems a bit far-flung, but stick with me.
When Mark Twain said that “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”, he was suggesting that travel can expand the human soul, and I would argue that kind of expansion does not happen so easily by way of luxury and pampering. It is just this kind of exhaustion, this little bit of suffering, that allows the traveler to grow as a person.
