Let me begin with a question: is every movement from place to place a “journey”?
To my mind, no. The movement of the body is, in itself, no more than a change of location. What turns a simple motion into a journey is what happens inside the traveller — in his thinking, in his ideas, and in his judgements about the world.
And it is a remarkable thing that, when we look into the history of thought, we find that many of the greatest sages of mankind cultivated their wisdom not in the corner of a library, but upon the roads and among peoples of every kind.
In the ancient East, Confucius, the great Chinese sage, travelled for nearly fourteen years among the various states, calling upon rulers to follow the right way in government. He won no political success, but those very journeys gathered his disciples about him and gave rise to that enduring book, the Analects. From this same tradition an old proverb survives: he who has only read books and has never travelled has an incomplete knowledge. On those same eastern shores, the Buddha, after attaining his inner illumination, spent the remaining forty-five years of his life wandering upon the road, carrying his teachings from city to city — as though truth were something to be borne among the people, and not hidden away in one place.
In ancient Greece and Rome there was a man named Diogenes the Cynic who, after his exile from his birthplace, chose homelessness of his own free will. When he was asked where he came from, he gave an answer that still rings today: “I am a citizen of the world.” This was one of the first conceptions in history of a person belonging not to a single city and a single people, but to the whole earth — and if you want the truth of it, that one sentence is the spirit of the book you now hold.
The great master Plato set out three times upon the long road to Sicily, in order to put the ideal of the “philosopher-ruler” to the test in practice. All three times he failed; but he showed that philosophy, for him, was no mere theory of the library.
And against all this ardour, Seneca the Stoic gave a wise warning, which I hold to be one of the truest things ever said about travel: a change of place does not, by itself, cure the pain within. He who is troubled, if he carries his soul with him just as it was, will find that his trouble has travelled with him. What is needed is a change of soul, not merely a change of climate. Keep that saying in mind; we shall return to it in later chapters.
In the world of Islam and of Persia, travel held a special importance. Ibn Khaldun, whom we now regard as one of the founders of historical sociology, passed a lifetime between Fez and Tunis and Granada and Cairo, and out of this direct experience of civilisations he developed his famous theory of the birth and death of civilisations in the Muqaddimah — the “Introduction” to his great history of the world. Ibn Battuta of Morocco, one of the greatest travellers of the Middle Ages, was upon the road for nearly thirty years and more than a hundred thousand kilometres — from Morocco to China — and left behind the book of his Rihla as the memorial of those journeys. Ibn Sina, that genius of medicine and philosophy, passed his life in continual movement between Bukhara and Rayy and Hamadan and Isfahan, and wrote a great part of the Canon and the Book of Healing upon these very travels.
And in the realm of poetry and mysticism, three names shine out. Saadi of Shiraz, who was upon the road for nearly thirty years and who gathered the treasury of the Golestan and the Bustan from the sights and the tales of the way, and who held travel itself to be a school for the ripening of a human being. Rumi, whose childhood was spent in his family’s great migration from Balkh to Konya, and whose inevitable homelessness prepared his soul for its great transformation. And Shams of Tabriz, that winged dervish who was forever travelling and searching for a kindred spirit, until in Konya he found Rumi — and the meeting of those two brought about one of the most impassioned transformations in the history of thought.
In the eyes of these great men, travel was at once a school, a mirror, a way of reaching one another, and a road towards the discovery of the unknown.
And at the threshold of the modern world, the philosophers of Europe restated this same inheritance in a new language. Francis Bacon, in his short essay Of Travel, wrote that travel is, for the young, a part of education, and for the grown man a part of experience — but on the condition that the traveller sets out with preparation, with purpose and with a notebook in hand; otherwise a journey without a plan is nothing but the wandering of the eyes.
Michel de Montaigne offered a deeper reason. Habit, he said, puts the eye of our judgement to sleep; and direct encounter with the civilisation and the customs of a different people breaks that sleep of habit and allows us to see our own beliefs from a distance. This expression — the breaking of the sleep of habit — is, to my mind, one of the most precise descriptions ever given of what travel does.
And Rousseau and Nietzsche both found their best thoughts not behind a desk but in the act of walking; Nietzsche used to say that only those thoughts have any value which are born in movement.
Now set these names beside one another — from Confucius to Nietzsche, from Saadi to Montaigne — and see what a simple yet profound truth appears: the mind that stays still remains narrow, and the horizon of the one who sets out grows wide. Travel, throughout history, has been one of the greatest roads to knowing: the knowing of the world, the knowing of people, and the knowing of oneself.
But if travel is so precious, a question arises which — if you want the truth of it — this entire book is in pursuit of answering: why should this treasure remain the monopoly of a few? How might we find a way by which every human being, from every corner of the earth, could travel easily and with dignity, and learn from it?
Sources: Confucius, the Analects; Plato, The Republic and the Seventh Letter; Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 28; Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (the “Introduction”); Ibn Battuta, Rihla; Ibn Sina, The Canon and The Book of Healing; Saadi, Golestan and Bustan; Aflaki, Manāqib al-ʿĀrifīn; Shams of Tabriz, Maqālāt; Francis Bacon, Of Travel; Montaigne, Essays; Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker; Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.