Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to- morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them.
What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.
Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say?
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life!