Whether through crowded airports or in the silence of your imagination, this is a month to travel. Time to set off with a pen
Summer time and the living is mobile. Once July arrives, many of us have hit, are about to hit, or are wondering if we can afford to hit the road. Be it a midweek break in Paris, a fortnight by the sea or three months on a J-1 visa in New York, summer is the time for travel. According to Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about the subject, it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive; for the next few weeks you are invited to test the hypothesis that it is better to travel in poetry than by public transport.
One of the great pleasures of any journey is the possibility of the unexpected encounter or experience. You turn a corner and suddenly the most dramatic panorama you've ever seen stretches out before you. You walk into a bar in a city you've never been in before and there they are, the lost love of your life and you think "we'll always have Paris" … Or maybe it's a bus trip on a moonlit night when suddenly a great animal wanders out onto the road, a moose perhaps – as in Elizabeth Bishop's account – delaying the journey but bringing its ineffable gift of joy to ease the way.
Of course, the encounters you have along the way will depend on the choices you make, the road you take, or the road not taken. Frost's poem is so familiar that it's easy to overlook quite how laden with paradox it is; both roads are worn "really about the same", and yet the speaker is happy to claim that picking the less worn one "made all the difference". How does he or she know? Maybe it's just the condition of journeying that we cannot know what might have happened if we had gone another way, made a different decision.
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Summer time and the living is mobile. Once July arrives, many of us have hit, are about to hit, or are wondering if we can afford to hit the road. Be it a midweek break in Paris, a fortnight by the sea or three months on a J-1 visa in New York, summer is the time for travel. According to Robert Louis Stevenson, who knew a thing or two about the subject, it's better to travel hopefully than to arrive; for the next few weeks you are invited to test the hypothesis that it is better to travel in poetry than by public transport.
One of the great pleasures of any journey is the possibility of the unexpected encounter or experience. You turn a corner and suddenly the most dramatic panorama you've ever seen stretches out before you. You walk into a bar in a city you've never been in before and there they are, the lost love of your life and you think "we'll always have Paris" … Or maybe it's a bus trip on a moonlit night when suddenly a great animal wanders out onto the road, a moose perhaps – as in Elizabeth Bishop's account – delaying the journey but bringing its ineffable gift of joy to ease the way.
Of course, the encounters you have along the way will depend on the choices you make, the road you take, or the road not taken. Frost's poem is so familiar that it's easy to overlook quite how laden with paradox it is; both roads are worn "really about the same", and yet the speaker is happy to claim that picking the less worn one "made all the difference". How does he or she know? Maybe it's just the condition of journeying that we cannot know what might have happened if we had gone another way, made a different decision.
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