Salut au Monde!

Wanderings

Hello World! There couldn’t be a more fitting title for my first blog post. And this verse from Walt Whitman’s poem by the same name perfectly captures the kind of experience that has inspired me to write this blog:

I see the cities of the earth and make myself at ran-

     dom a part of them,

I am a real Parisian,

I am a habitan of Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, 

     Constantinople,

I am of Adelaide, Sidney, Melbourne,

I am of London, Manchester, Bristol, Edinburgh, 

     Limerick,

I am of Madrid, Cadiz, Barcelona, Oporto, 

     Lyons, Brussels, Berne, Frankfort, Stuttgart, Turin, 

     Florence,

I belong in Moscow, Cracow, Warsaw, or northward 

     in Christiania or Stockholm, or in Siberian 

     Irkutsk - or in some street in Iceland,

I descend upon all those cities, and rise from them 

     again.

- from “Salut au Monde!” (cerca 1856) by Walt Whitman

You can read the full poem here. But here’s why I like it:

There’s a reason he doesn’t say “I went to Paris” or “I visited Berlin” or “I did Constantinople.” That’s because travel has the power to be much more than a checklist of destinations.

The way Whitman puts it – “I am of Barcelona” and “I belong in Warsaw” – practically lifts you off your seat and takes you there with him. The place gets under your skin and you become part of it. And when you “descend” on a place and “rise” again from it, you become a different person too.

It’s true, certain places are better at drawing us in than others. But the secret of great travel is not the destination – it’s the discovery.