Blog post to come, but in the meantime I am going to entertain you with this really wonderful quote about humans and travel. I wanted to edit it to make it more gender-inclusive, but it got too complicated. Just keep in mind women do all these things too. The author Ryzard Kapuscinski, is talking about why Herodotus (a Greek born in 485 B.C.) was motivated to travel as he did throughout the Asia, Africa, and Europe (the entire known world), and report on it endlessly until finally writing his work, "Histories."
"What set man into motion? Made him act? Compelled him to undertake the hardships of travel, to subject himself to the hazards of one expedition after another? I think it was simply a curiosity about the world. The desire to be there, to see it at any cost, to experience it no matter what.
It is actually a seldom encountered passion. Man is by nature a sedentary creature from the moment he began cultivating the land and left behind the perilous and uncertain existence of a hunter or gatherer, he settled down happily, naturally, on his particular patch of earth and fenced himself off from others with a wall or a ditch, prepared to shed blood, even give his life to defend what was his. If he moved, it was only under duress, or war, or by the search for better work, or for professional reasons--because he was a sailor, an itinerant, merchant, leader of a caravan. But to traverse the world for years on end of his own free will, in order to know it, to plumb it, to understand it? And then, later, to put all his findings into words? Such people have always been uncommon.
Where did this passion of Herodotus's come from? perhaps from the question that arose in a child's mind, the one about where ships come from. Children playing in the sand at the edge of a bay can see a ship suddenly appear far way on the horizon line and grow larger and large as it sails toward them Where did it originate? Most children do not ask themselves this question. But one, making castles out of sand, suddenly might. Where did this ship come from? The line between the sky and sea, very, very far away, had always seemed the end of the world; could it be that there is another world beyond that line? and then another one beyond that? what kind of world might it be? the child starts to seek answers. Later, when she grows up, she may have the freedom to seek even more persistently.
The road itself offers some relief. Motion. Travel. Herodotus's book arose from travel; it is world literature's first great work of reportage. Its author has reportorial instincts , a journalistic eye and ear. He is indefatigable; he sails over the sea, traverses the steppe, ventures deep into the desert--we have his accounts of all this. He astonishes us with his relentlessness, never complains of exhaustion. Nothing discourages him, and not once does he say that he is afraid.
What propelled him, fearless and tireless as he was, to throw himself into this great adventure? I think that it was an optimistic faith, one that we people lost long ago; faith in the possibility and value of truly describing the world."
