"I must be gone and live, or stay and die"... On travels and literature

     Travels are privileged times. And reading is the ultimate privilege of patient travellers.

While on the roads of South India, I took many buses, on rides that took hours and even nights, and I stayed alone in quite a few guesthouses and restaurants. Therefore my cherished companions were mainly books, novels, guides and one travel literature masterpiece.

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My first choice was a personal one, a novel by Jack Kerouac I came across on a London bookshop, down the Old Street Tube Station, Camden Locks Books. Not 'On the Road', his well-know masterpiece, but 'The Subterraneans', a short novel remaining as a embodiment of the unique Beat Generation writing years. Its unseen and revolutionary style, its singled out voice and its peculiar topics - unprecedented for the times - are more than ever noticeable nowadays and made the novel become right away one of my favourite texts of the American literature I came across.

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The second one started with a memorable quote: "I must be gone and live, or stay and die" (Romeo, in 'Romeo and Juliet', Act 3, Scene 5, by William Shakespeare). As in the Epigraph of 'The Way of the World', by Nicolas Bouvier.

Nicolas Bouvier was a Swiss traveller and writer who wandered on the Eastern routes in the 1950s, crossing the Balkans, Turkey, Iran and India, while the Cold War was only starting. And from these journeys, he brought back some amazing words. 'The Way of the World' was published in 1963 and written in French, and is still considered as a masterpiece of travel literature. It recounts of a journey taking Bouvier and his painter friend Thierry from Serbia to the gates of India, mainly through the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus and Iran.

I can confirm there is a great feeling of inspiration coming from reading travel literature on the road. For at least you know one person understood the depth than can come from what others only sees as a running-away bad habit... For most people believe, as a French man once told me, that "to leave is to die a little", as the Edmond Haraucourt's (1857-1941) poem 'Rondel de l'adieu' stated in its first verse, becoming a common French adage. I, on the contrary, strongly believe there is no life without movement, and travel is an essence of life. 

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Stopping for a while in Auroville, Sri Aurobindo and Mira Alfassa's dreamt and utopian city located in the very heart of India's Tamil Nadu, I encountered a new classic, the 'Letters from Africa' by the great Isak Dinesen, aka Karen Blixen. The correspondence of the Danish writer with her mother, her brother and her closest ones in Denmark offers a direct insight into Blixen's life in her African farm on the Ngong Hills in Kenya from the 1910s to the 1930s and marvellously complete her unforgettable novel 'Out of Africa'. 

Since Nairobi has become one of my favourite places among all the cities I have been lucky to live in, this text could only feel very special to me. Reading them while away on my first trip to Asia, a few weeks away only from my latest journey in Kenya - last January - these letters have open a long list of reflections in my thoughts and considerations of this new year, a year already dedicated to travelling and reading and writing...