Travel for travel’s sake

I love Robert Louis Stevenson for the fact that, despite being crippled by a chronic bronchial condition (probably TB) that eventually killed him, he was a restless traveller to the end of his days, always on a quest for a happiness that remained just beyond his reach. In 1876, he decided to take a walk through the mountains of Central France together with a donkey to carry his baggage, a journey he recounted in Travels With A Donkey in the Cévennes. It is a deceptively modest little book in which he entirely fails to mention that in its course he met and fell in love with the woman who afterwards became his wife. His philosophy is summed up in one neat little paragraph: “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.” There’s something very Buddhist about those words that seem to me to echo many of the thoughts to be found in the Dhammapada.

 

Charles Allen is an author and historian whose latest book is Ashoka: The Search For India’s Lost Emperor.