I doubt you would find much argument that the best-known quote regarding travel comes from — or is at least attributed to — philosopher/theologian St. Augustine there in the ancient city of Hippo: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
His famous metaphor still just about says it all.
I learned its message early. While in college I was sent to Ireland one summer by a then-new type of guidebook for European travel, Let’s Go: The Student Guide to Adventure. Written entirely by Harvard students, it targeted a shoestring-budget audience of that age, and I was assigned to contribute the entry on Ireland.
Actually, the assignment itself was a bust. Instead of generating the expected recommendations on the best cheap pubs and hostels, I was more interested in using the stay to track down sites and practically anything else associated with the Irish literary giants I was crazy about, like novelist James Joyce and poet William Butler Yeats. I acquired some good Irish friends before long, too. Back in the U.S. that fall, I turned out a dozen pages of hurried, somewhat bluffed copy for the guidebook, little of which the editors saw fit to use. But that didn’t bother me, because, most importantly, in Ireland I’d been bitten by the travel bug, all right.
I wanted to learn more about the world and its people and, yes, its literature. If put on this sweet planet for only so long, I wanted my share of that action, trying even today to pursue it the way I did when a kid — as a genuine traveler and not merely a tourist.
And for me travel continues to have a literary focus, however wide the geographical range over the years. I’ve spent time in Vietnam and Cameroon interviewing writers. I’ve made multiple trips to South America (from Colombia to Argentina and spots between); there, I bounced around by bus, river ferry, and on occasion bicycle, losing myself in the continent’s culture and hoping to better understand why it has produced an uncanny abundance of acclaimed contemporary literature.
Similar explorations in many other countries have also reinforced how lucky I was to get that first taste of true travel in Ireland, granting I did disappoint the guidebook editors.
So, to now address the specific matter at hand here, Life & Letter’s invitation to offer supposedly “highbrow” advice on life. Of course I realize that I am far from qualified to pontificate with any windy comprehensive master plan of my own on that. Nevertheless, I won’t hesitate to echo St. Augustine, a certified highbrow authority, and tell anybody I can — especially students — to without question try to include some travel in life. It’s always best and most satisfying when young. And it doesn’t have to be prompted by something like my literary obsessions. Whether study abroad or employment abroad or simply a month or two of serendipitous backpacking — as the ad says, just do it.
Let me cite a case in point.
A year ago, a UT undergrad student of mine, Jess Smith, wrote a wonderful short story collection for her creative writing honors thesis. Jess needed no advice from me concerning her plans upon graduation. She went right into the Peace Corps, and after a language crash-course stateside she headed to rural Thailand to live with a local family and teach school.
Summoning her writing talent, she has launched a several-page newsletter, which she regularly sends me. The contents give a mix of news of the Peace Corps’ Thailand program and spirited articles that describe her own recent activity, flanked by photos. There are bright-color shots of Jess surrounded by happy children; Jess with monks at a Buddhist monastery; Jess bicycling alone out on a day trip along an arrow-straight road in the panoramic countryside, smiling. When each emailed issue arrives, I read every word.
In this case envy seems only natural, and I do envy Jess being so young and adventuresome and her rare opportunity for such valuable experiences that will enhance her life to come. But I suppose it’s not exactly envy — rather, it’s just my admiration of the way she is contributing so much internationally in these turbulent times worldwide, when we definitely could use a whole lot more American understanding of other places as well as full personal contribution.
Jess Smith, she’s somebody who has really tuned in on old St. Augustine’s essential message.
Peter LaSalle teaches creative writing in UT-Austin’s English department and the Michener Center for Writers. A novelist and short story writer, he has also published two books on literary travel, The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (Dzanc Books, 2015) and The World Is a Book, Indeed (LSU Press, 2020).