O Go You Onward

O go you onward; where you areShall honour and laughter be,Past purple forest and pearled foam,God's winged pavilion free to roam,Your face, that is a wandering home,A flying home for me.The Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton
Travel has been on my mind.  In a series of events connected only by John Carterian leaps I've been thinking about travel, about places I've been and places I'm slotted to be at some point in the future.  I'm not a great traveller; I'm very easily cowed by the hugeness of the world, the noise of it, the emptiness of it.  The taste of our time's air is the taste of frantic despair.  I don't like it.  I would rather not go out in it.

Turning together, they looked up beyond the wharf to the rising buildings and cold winter sky, their eyes narrowed against the driving rain.  Everything was foreign.  They did not even have Rhodri there to make them feel safe."I wish I could kill it all,"  rasped Eikin.Adamant clung to his arm.  "I - I know what you mean."Adamantine
But I have always been a sort of traveller.   When people read my writing, they frequently tell me, "It's as if I was there!"  If you are a writer yourself you can imagine the magnitude of this compliment.  People often want to know how I manage to do that, and I suppose a simple answer (it isn't as if I actually know what I am doing) is that I've travelled extensively myself.  I have the ninth century and Wessex sitting next to me at this very moment.  I've seen Rome during years of her eternal reign.  I've rambled expansively through northwest India.  I've swished my feet in the Nile (which is not exactly advisable due to Lord Crocodile).  I've yanked an oar through the North Sea.  I've seen France under English rule.  I've wiggled bare toes among the primroses of a Kentish meadow.  I've been to Wales.  I've been to the Baltic.  Somewhere along the way I got lost in the Scandinavia of The Snow Queen.  I've been to Mercury.  I've been to Venus.  I've been to Mars.  I've taken up residence on the Moon.  I've even seen Saturn from a distance.  "You've been to England, haven't you?" someone asked me after reading a piece of my work.  Not strictly speaking.  I just read a lot. 

And there's the rub.  I'm a poor little pygmy that doesn't like to stray from her fire.  I'll gladly sail the frigate of a book, which costs far less and doesn't make me sea-sick; the worlds are all but just as vivid in their pages, the possibilities of adventure far greater.  I can pop into the kitchen any time I want for a cup of tea or a snack, which one can't do some thousand feet in the air on a jet that probably has never heard of "Twinings" and would confiscate all my tea thinking it was a type of drug.  I'm the policeman on the beat on the Path of Least Resistance.  I have shelves of doors into other times and places.  I have the key to each of them.  I don't have to pay fare to pass through any of them.  The white feather in me asks in very eloquent prose why I should be made to pay, to fly, to endure jet-lag and culture-shock to go to foreign places.  Apparently some people don't mind it.  I'm reading a book by the world-renowned Ravi Zacharias: anyone remotely acquainted with him knows that he has travelled extensively for years and, I think, enjoys it.  I can only sit in a blank sort of awe and wonder, respectfully, why.  Beyond the monologue-ing white feather is an even whiter feather adding background vocals that sound a lot like agonized screaming.

This is the place to which I have come in my ponderings on travel.  Despot-like, I don't feel particularly inclined to stir from my couch if all other places and peoples can come to me.   I am perfectly aware that this is smooth, gilt, self-possessed cowardice.  I am perfectly aware that I'll have to get over it and enjoy myself.  I have a friend on Mercury who somehow managed to combine both...

And you?  Where have you been, and do you like travel?  Have we been to the same places, you and I?  We may have passed like two ships in the night.