"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find
ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about
the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what
little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the
globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence,
to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and
fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best
described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by
George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We
"need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open
solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure
hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to
be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."
Why We Travel by Pico Iyer
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