Only 10 days now until I board the plane that will take me to New York, and from there to Mexico... Central America, South America, and, if I'm lucky enough to get there, Buenos Aires. 

Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines; the book he wrote about Australian Aboriginals' Dreamtime songlines. These songs recount their ancestor's creational journeys through Australia. Through these journeys, their ancestors "sang the world into existence". Their mythology of creation, if you may; which I'm not going to delve any deeper into, as the subject is infinitely more complex and I'm still struggling to grasp it fully. 

Half way through the book, Bruce takes a break from recounting his journey through Australia and lists, one after the next, quotes, little experiences and thoughts that made him ponder on the philosophy of travelling. Here are some of the quotes the struck me the most:                                                                                     

1. " Pascal, in one of his gloomier pensées, gave it as his opinion that all our miseries stemmed from a single cause: our inability to remain quietly in a room.                                Why, he asked, must a man with sufficient to live on feel drawn to divert himself on long sea voyages? To dwell in another town? To go off in search of a peppercorn? Or go off to war and break skulls. Later, on further reflection, having discovered the cause of our misfortunes, he wished to understand the reason for them, he found one very good reason: namely, the natural unhappiness of our weak mortal condition; so unhappy that when we gave to it all our attention, nothing could console us.                                                   One thing alone could alleviate our despair, and that was 'distraction' (divertissement): yet this was the worst of our misfortunes, for in distraction we were prevented from thinking about ourselves and were gradually brought to ruin.                                                 Could it be, I wondered, that our need for distraction, our mania for the new, was, in essence, an instinctive migratory urge akin to that of birds in autumn?                                 All the Great Teachers have preached that Man, originally, was a 'wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world' – the words are those of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor– and that to rediscover his humanity, he must slough off attachements and take to the road."                                                                                                                         
2. Pascal, Pensées: "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death."
3. Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes: "A study of the Great Malady; horror of home."
4. Bruce Chatwin: "On the night express from Moscow to Kiev, reading Donne's third Elegie: 'To live in one land, is captivity, To runne all countries, a wild roguery.'  " 
5. A Moorish proverb: "He who does not travel does not know the value of men"
6. Soren Kierkegaard, letter to Jette (1847): "Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of  well-being and walk away from every illness: I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill... Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right." 
7. Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer: "For a long time I prided myself I would posses every possible country."               
8. Bruce Chatwin. Mauritania, on the road to Atar: " There were about fifty people on top of the truck, huddled against sacks of grain. We were half-way to Atar when a sandstorm hit. Next to me was a strong-smelling Senegalese. He said he was twenty-five. He was stocky and over-muscled, and his teeth were orange from chewing cola nuts. 'You are going to Atar?' he asked. 'You too?'  'No. I am going to France.'  'What for?' 'To continue my profession.' 'What is your profession?'  'Installation sanitaire.'  'You have a passport?'  'No.' He grinned. 'I have a paper.' He unfolded a soggy scrap of paper on which I read that Don Hernando So- and-so, master of the trawler such-and-such, had employed Amadou...  surname blank... etc, etc. 'I will go to Villa Cisneros,' he said. 'I will take a trip to Tenerife or Las Palmas in the Gran Canaria. There I will continue my profession.'  'As a sailor?' 'No, Monsieur. As an adventurer. I wish to see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.' "                                                                                                 
9. " 'Travel': same word as 'travail' – 'bodily or mental labour', 'toil, especially of a painful or oppressive nature', 'exertion', 'hardship', 'suffering', A 'journey'                                                 
10. Gautama Buddha: "You cannot travel on the path before you have become the Path itself. 
11. Meister Eckhart: " The Wayless Ways, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves."