In Invisible Cities, the fabulous geography apocryphal Calvino, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan inquire into the reasons that have made the first move away from their homeland. Marco Polo says that each city returns through a piece of memory that was lost, that when impregnable citadels and palaces explores remote does nothing to make up the Venetian square in which he played as a child. Finally, the Kublai Khan understands. "Then yours is a memory trip!" He says, "You've come so far to get rid of your burden of nostalgia!".
Perhaps Calvino's Marco Polo was surprised at the accurate deduction of his interlocutor. The traveler is always something mysterious, almost visionary. And yet the Kublai Khan discovered that the mechanism that drives it is very simple, like a catapult loaded nostalgia and travelers away from home every time he returns to it.
Whenever I have to travel all around me I hear the same comments: "Lucky", "What envy", "How well you ride it." From those who do not usually travel in those who remain in their homes (often, and against what they like to believe, because they want).
live as one chooses is a great privilege, of course, either with or without travel. Each manages its resources as they want or can and there is nothing wrong with that. However, I feel that those people who envy my luck (or think they do) not aware of the problems that face the travel. They never think of working more than twenty-four hours and causing exhaustion, sickness or inevitable bus bouncing on rough roads, or one suffering from diarrhea in toilets rusty, or in the strenuous days in the you walk aimlessly in huge cities and miss more than thirty degrees. Do not think anyone envies that. Everyone likes, yes, photos, anecdotes and exotic experience moving away a bit from home. And
Despite everything, travel back out again and again. There are several reasons for this. I guess in those moments when I'm away I think I'm where I should be, as if escaping from some inexorable fate that haunts me when I'm comfortably in my city. I feel that the days do not pass in vain and that efforts are in vain. And I have the impression it more or less well, when it is proven that in my everyday life (the civilized West) tend to be vague and sloppy.
But maybe, just happens to Marco Polo in Calvino, is an inevitable nostalgia of unknown origin that drives me to move. And traveling is that it behaves like a magnet polarity changing the country that attracts and repels as far as you return to it, like Marco Polo and Kublai Khan coexist within oneself.
(A nostalgic anyone walking through the dilapidated streets of Jaipur.)
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