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The essay below appears in this month’s Harper’s. I’ll comment on it later.
By Nicholas Delbanco
Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or a report at journey’s end, a message from the provinces or a dispatch from the capital: each must be written down. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Hindu epic Mahabharata, The Tale of Genji on his wanderings: all these record departure and new terrain traversed. And there’s a retentiveness also entailed; when the bear goes over the mountain to see what he can see he carries with him
