From “Ultimate Journey” by Richard Bernstein’

The horror of home.

It is said about Peter Fleming, the author of the classic News From Tartary, in which he recounted his 1935 trip of almost a year, mostly on foot and on horseback, from Peking to New Delhi across Chinese Turkestan and over the Pamir Mountains, that once he got home, he lived happily thereafter in a house in Surrey and never left again. But when he traveled, he did it with disregard for discomfort that I take as a model to emulate. He celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday while trekking across Xinijang with Ella Maillart, and on that day he describes a tough walk, heavy sleet, and a meal of antelope, rice, and curry that he claims sardonically to have been sumptuous. “And we both thanked heaven that we were not celebrating somebody’s birthday at the Savoy”, he writes.

I understood that. To be on the mountain was uncomfortable, but it was also to be free, unencumbered, without obligations; it was death-defying, exciting, life on the Nitzchean edge.

…

It is the dread that home, so romanticized in poetry, so idealized in imagination, is humdrum, safe, boring, a denial of the more romantic possibilities of life.

19 March 2007

Wow. I wrote that more than a year ago, and what a year this has been! Last year, my urge to travel, to cover vast distances with my body and my mind subsided… I no longer want to run away from self, I have concluded armistice with self, and for this I am eternally grateful to Tibet. I may take a break from travels, as in ‘moving constantly from one place to another’, but I am now trying to spend more time in China, and Tibet; go deeper, not further; to give something back to the communities visited, not just be on the receiving side, as a traveller normally is. My travel journals, rest in peace...