Travelling: “I know what I fly from, but not what I seek”

Sometimes, when reading Montaigne, I think that I simply can quote him in order to describe how I myself think about a certain theme. Just change some words, modernize the situation described a little bit and you get my thought. Take travelling. My wife and I often travel without a real plan what to do and where to go. That is, we have determined a region where to go, a date when to leave and one when to return (and even the return date can change during the trip) and then we go. Usually, we have some vague idea what to visit, but what we’ll really do is usually only determined when we have arrived in our region of destination. Often we don’t know in the morning where’ll we’ll sleep in the evening. We can even change the region where to go during the trip. So on our way to Slovakia we ended in Switzerland, for at the end of our first day we discovered that it wasn’t only hot in Slovakia, but that the heatwave would last at least a week, while in Switzerland the weather was fine and cool. I think that Montaigne was also the kind of person who liked this way of travelling very much. Anyway, when I read his travel diary I got the impression that he let the progress of the trip depend on the quality of the landscape and the cities he passed and on the persons he happened to meet. Of course, much was different for a traveller in Montaigne’s days. Then a traveller had to go by foot, horse, coach or cart, while today people travel by car, train or plane and sometimes by bike and only rarely yet by foot. Montaigne preferred to travel by horse and I am like him in the sense that I made my best trips by bike or car, the modern variations of horse and coach.
Nevertheless, before I leave  my mood is always: Why should I go? Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? For, as Montaigne tells us in essay III-9 of the Essays, titled “Of Vanity”, “I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.” The future is uncertain; I don’t know what is waiting me. Therefore, so Montaigne, “I am hard to be got out … I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbor, as for the longest voyage.” Even so, Montaigne doesn’t stay at home, for if others “tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is hard to be believed: ‘There are so many forms of crime!’; secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much as our own.” In other words, you think that at home it is best; you think “home sweet home”. But is it really so? There are many ways of life, and maybe we can learn from them. So let’s go. And once my wife and I have closed the door of our house behind us, everything is different. We are on our way and being on the way is a different kind of feeling. “Being once upon the road, I [Montaigne] hold out as well as the best.”
Travelling in the proper sense is not going somewhere but it is pure going. The real travel has no destination. It is moving, even when you stop for a rest, for sightseeing or for the night. “I neither undertake [a travel] to return, nor to finish it: my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me.” Sometimes it happens that you pass a place where you would like to stay longer: “I have seen places enough a great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed.” And sometimes Montaigne really did. For instance, he stayed in Rome for months, though not without a break. Also then he couldn’t withstand the inner pressure to travel. He left Rome for some time for a trip through central Italy. Although my wife and I never made such a long stop during our travels as Montaigne did in Rome, once we see a reason to stay somewhere longer, we do. But each travel has an end, alas. During his famous trip through Europe, Montaigne was called back from Rome by the French King, who had appointed him mayor of Bordeaux. Montaigne left reluctantly. Nevertheless, also his homeward journey was yet a real travel: not a straightforward horse ride to Bordeaux, but staying here, staying there, until he could no longer postpone his return, since the king was calling him. For my wife and I usually the date of return has been planned, for instance, because we had booked a ferry already before our trip. But in the absence of such an urge, also for us the date of return is not really fixed. This return then is always a bit double: a longing to be home again but also a wish to stay on the move. Once at home there is always a nostalgia for the travel that has ended and a reluctance to return to the stream of daily life. It lasts a few days and then the rat race of “real” life appears to have been taken up again. This lasts till we think again: Where shall we go? Where will our next travel be? But also this is double, for then the mind starts to think: Why this trouble? Isn’t it good enough here at home? I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek. But isn’t that the sense of travelling?