On Travel

(Vacation picture)

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

So says G. K. Chesterton, prolific British author and Christian apologist, whose life bridged the 19th and 20th centuries.

Chesterton has much to say about travel, largely on how to do it well and how it can affect the traveller. 

The quotation above comes from “The Riddle of the Ivy,” a short sketch in his Tremendous Trifles. When a friend asks why he is packing his luggage, Chesterton tells him he is traveling through Paris, Belfort, Heidelberg, and Frankfort, with the aim of finding the Battersea district of London.

Knowing that his destination is their current location, his friend says, “I suppose it is unnecessary to tell you that this is Battersea?”

“It is quite unnecessary,” I said, “and it is spiritually untrue. I cannot see any Battersea here; I cannot see any London or any England. I cannot see that door. I cannot see that chair: because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes. The only way to get back to them is to go somewhere else; and that is the real object of travel and the real pleasure of holidays. Do you suppose that I go to France in order to see France? Do you suppose that I go to Germany in order to see Germany? I shall enjoy them both; but it is not them that I am seeking. I am seeking Battersea. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

And then the man who deals so much with paradox that he has been called “the prince of paradox” cautions his friend, with threat of physical harm, against referring to his thoughts as paradoxical:

“Now I warn you that this Gladstone bag is compact and heavy, and that if you utter that word ‘paradox’ I shall hurl it at your head. I did not make the world, and I did not make it paradoxical. It is not my fault, it is the truth, that the only way to go to England is to go away from it.”

A month later, his opinion is confirmed when he returns to England and sees it with a wonderful freshness. . . .

~From an article by Craig Thompson