Mexico -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
When I got to Russia, I realized a great big new country that was
thinking and working in a way I had never dreamt of. It was a
tremendous awakening. And now, what hazard has led me back to my
mother’s country? I find it is another great big new world, working
and thinking in just as new and different a way, and as differently
as Russia. But the size of these countries is what appeals to me.
In Russia I could have (but I didn’t) taken a train for days, and
travelled to other parts and been still in Russia. Here I have not, but
I will--go west, go south, go north. For days and days I shall be able
to go. From a commercial provincial town out into the land of endless
flowers where there are no seasons, and the land gives out two crops a
year.
I have a great desire to see more, and more, and yet more. To see it
all, in fact. But I am tired (already) of civilization, of the luxury
of baths and telephones, and the overabundance of food. I am tired of
people, even of people who are kind, and people who are brilliant.
I want to take Dick and get away somewhere into the wilds. Whenever
I ask if there is some village in the hills; with an Inn, as for
instance, in Cornwall, or in Italy, I am recommended a primitive wood,
where there is “a colony.” I want to get away from the colony! Can’t
I live for a while, as at Lerici, seeing only peasant people? Even
outside Rome, within half an hour by rail, I found myself in Arcadian
groves, where it seemed that only Pan had lived. I am told that here
it is impossible, however remotely one travel to get away from the
telegraph, telephone and motor cars. From England I had visualized
this country, as consisting of New York, Washington and Chicago and
Boston, and for the rest, that one mounted a horse, and rode out over
prairies towards mountains. And I mean to find it is so. The land of
the Red Indian must still contain some primitive unreclaimed spots.
Anyway, there it all is, and mine if I choose to go and look for it.
The world is a great wonder-place with wonder-people in it. I am drunk
with love of it, love of the beauty and the capriciousness, and the
unexpectedness of it. I want to see it all--Mexico, China, Egypt,
Greece and back again to Russia, working all the way, hunting heads,
and reading people and never arriving at any understanding, but loving
it always as one loves the person who is big, generous, elusive, full
of moods, and never to be understood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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