Travel Makes Life Feel Longer

Why is it that, after years at home, stuck in the back-and-forth of your domestic routine, or in the ups and downs of your job, you spend a week traveling somewhere pleasant or strange, and that one week blazes larger in your memory than all those years? This happens to me often: Travel appears to offer an enlargement of time. And it’s not just me. The clerk at my post office can recall in detail her 10 days in Hawaii and the pineapple ice cream she ate on the sunny shore many years earlier. Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers unpacks the sojourn across an unusually long travel book, while D.H. Lawrence rambled for nine days in Sardinia in 1921; his book about the experience, Sea and Sardinia, rambles on for hundreds of pages.

Hyperbole might explain such literary fattening, but I can’t rid my mind of the feeling that, in travel, time itself is amplified, especially in retrospect.

Maybe it’s that travelers finding new experiences discover those experiences to loom larger and lengthen time in their memory. The traveler is often captive to the slow-moving, and the marvelous, and the memorable, in strangeness.

Doris Lessing provides a lovely description of this in the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin. “Once I was making a mental list of all the places I had lived in, having moved about so much, and soon concluded that the commonsense or factual approach leads to nothing but error,” she writes. “You may live in a place for months, even years, and it does not touch you, but a weekend or a night in another, and you feel as if your whole being has been sprayed with the equivalent of a cosmic wind.”

In the rhythm of my writing life, whenever I’ve completed a book, I’ve felt an urge to take a trip. It’s seldom the idea of writing a travel book that drives me, though a book has been the inevitable result of a long journey, since I need to pay my way. Necessary episodes of travel constitute my mode of being, and they have intensified as I’ve grown older. I never examined this necessity; I accepted it, and, thankfully, so did my wife. I rationalized my disappearing act by talking about growing up in a big family, my hatred of confinement and scrutiny, my need for space, my curiosity.

That was true, but I had deeper reasons, which at first I was unable to articulate, because I did not fully understand them. Yet the passage of time has allowed me to see better: Aging is the great clarifier, offering wonderful, unanticipated insights, because aging is an odyssey of enlightenment. Growing old is also a lesson in timekeeping: You value time as precious and want more. I began to understand that the natural wish in old age for more time can be granted by travel.

I always knew travel to be an enhancement of life, something richer than anything I’d experience at home. But now I saw that travel also offers an expansion of time. I am not alone in perceiving this phenomenon. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once observed, in a mathematical way, “When we are traveling: one month away seems longer to us than four at home.”