Reflection on Of Travel by Francis Bacon

　Do we have to travel? And what is travel? And what is needed to be a good traveller?

“As the idiom goes: He that travels far knows much. Every day, we walk to the office, to school, and to the local market a mile a day. After ten or twenty years, there will be thousands of miles walked. If we were to see that street we pass by every day as if for the first time, and were to see everything novelly, we would not have been turning a blind eye. It would be similar to travel far. Why do we have to necessarily travel across the ocean?” [1]

I do see the point of traveling but I think the point is more about being a stranger everywhere, a perfect traveller, as Hugh of Saint Victor stated hundreds of years ago. Moreover, if every time we travel to a point on earth and can relate to a point in past (as on a Cartesian coordinate system with an x-axis of Time and a y-axis of Displacement), we will be not only a good but certainly an even better traveller. Imagination and memory matter. Yes, yes, we need to (know how to) travel.

[1] Translated from 張愛玲《道路以目》