What’s in a quote?

“The world is a book, and those who don’t travel read only one page.” -St Augustine

You may recognize this quote; it’s become ubiquitous in the travel world. I think there is a certain wonderful truth to it, but there are also many delicate caveats to its truth.  The important thing is to restrict the meaning of “the world” to the physical globe, and not to confuse the meaning with “life.”

Because life is a library, filled to the gills with more books than a person could ever hope to read in one lifetime. In this library, everything is a book – or more realistically, multiple books, which is nothing to say of how most books have multiple themes. You could replace a few choice words in the aforementioned quote and come up with something familiar, but completely new:

“Love is a book, and those who don’t date around read only one page.”

“Parenthood is a book, and those who don’t procreate don’t even crack the cover.”

But here’s the thing: maybe some people have no interest in certain books.  My imagination isn’t captured by particle physics or political science, but this doesn’t mean I’m any less human than the people who dedicate their lives to studying electrons and elections. Likewise, while I spend nearly every cent I have on travel and every other second thinking about my next trip, it’s not to say that people who don’t or can’t travel are less human than I.  We only have finite amounts of energy and time, so we must direct it toward reading the books that we’re inspired by, at the expense of missing out on the wisdom contained in the books that we’re not.

Herein lies the beauty of human society. Not all of us have to be interested in the same things; we are instead a fabric woven from individual passions.  Each of us is a thread colored and textured by our unique interests, and only when added together do we form a technicolor tapestry, made of linens and silks and hemps.  We need the bright colors of the parents and the artists and the statisticians just as much as we need the travelers. If every person were only interested in the Holy Book of Travel, our society would become a monochromatic blanket devoid of knowledge about literature or astrophysics or calculus. This is not even to mention that it’s only through these disparate individual passions that we even find other cultures worth exploring when we travel, rather than people who think and behave just like ourselves.

The analogy of world to book is also imperfect. It implies that the world has a linear beginning, middle, and end.  That the entirety of geology and geography and human culture can be tidily condensed, bound and squashed between two cardboard covers.  That you must read the entire thing, cover to cover, in order to reap the benefits.  That you must travel as furiously and quickly and entirely as possible, risking exhaustion and burn-out, to set foot in every city in every country on every continent in the world, before you can fully reach enlightenment.  Or even that there is a concrete set of ideas you should take away from all of it, after you’ve “finished” the book.

Equally as concerning is the insinuation that reading only one page is necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps if a person reads only one page, or even three pages, they can fully grasp the concepts written on that page more wholly than someone who spends thirty seconds on it before flipping to the next.  The students of a single page spend a lifetime scribbling in the margins, and absorb the relevant points so fully that they have their own lessons to teach to those of us who are just passing through on the way to the next page.

It is for this exact reason that you can often see the parenthesized idea of a city in the eyes of an ancient grandmother who has never left her home town.  It is why so many people want to connect and converse with natives while traveling, to hear “authentic” stories and to get personalized recommendations rather than relying on mass-produced guidebooks written, ironically, by other travelers.  We can learn more about a place from the expertise of the one-pagers than we could ever learn from a fellow through-reader of the book.

Of course, I encourage people to travel with every chance I get. I believe that travel is like C4 to close-mindedness, that it blasts open all of those narrow viewpoints and lets light flood over those cobwebby and deeply-ingrained opinions hidden deep within our brains. I think traveling would be a great boon to many in my home country, where less than half of all eligible citizens have a passport, especially for those who have learned to hate other cultures simply because they were taught to do so or because they fear the unknown. Travel has bettered me; it’s forced me again and again to come out of my shell, to learn how to listen, to lower barriers and quickly connect with people.  And this is not to mention the sheer beauty of the places and cultures I’ve encountered, those places I can still see etched on the backs of my eyelids when I lay down to sleep at night.  But I also realize that travel is a privilege, and that it’s an impossible goal or uninteresting venture for some.

At the end of the day, I think it is just as narrow-minded to look down upon those who don’t travel as it is to assume that traveling is the only “book” worth being read. There are many roads that lead to learning, and the things I gain by exploring the wilds of Romania may be acquired by someone else by staring into the glassy eye of a microscope. We are all different, with disparate interests and strengths, and our society is better for it.