The virus of restlessness

To Taiwan in an artist book filled with temple papers of gold and red.

I’ve started reading again. Time was every Saturday afternoon I would read a book after I had finished work for the week. I read a lot of books over those ten years working as a librarian in a small country town.

Nowdays I don’t seem to have the same time to take this simple pleasure. To get lost in a book, to travel to places real or imagined, to expand my horizons between the covers.

Yesterday I was at a garage sale. It was raining and I perused the books as is my first inclination. There I discovered a favourite author, John Steinbeck, he of Mice and Men, and the Grapes of Wrath fame. I read his Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday along with Hesse and Faulkner when I studied my first degree in literature.

Now I am discovering Travels with Charley. It’s a travel adventure in a pick up truck as the author seeks to traverse the backroads and villages of rural America. There is something alluring about the urge to go, to leave. It is a “virus of restlessness”, he writes, that takes possession of its victim. I can so relate to this.

Travel was always in my stars. Being born on a Thursday I knew I had far to go and sought numerous ways to transport myself there. Train travel, bus, bike, horse and cart, ferries, (I love them) and then the big overseas adventure taking off by plane when I was 21 years old.

Now I look back on those travels understanding at once what Steinbeck said when he talked about the urge to be some place else. Not that I don’t like where I am, but I am always looking over the horizon. Of course this year all travel plans were cancelled and I found myself looking inwards.

Now I am turning outwards again but without the desire to actually travel. More to travel with my memories and so have been making artist books again with maps and patterns and words to describe the journeys of imagination. This week I’ve been to Florence in a woven book, Mexico in a map and listening to firecrackers explode in Taiwan’s temples of gold and red. It’s travel in an another sort of book.

I look at the my bookshelves which I am continually culling and find my favourite section is still the half a dozen books that call me to adventure. Ourselves Writ Strange by Alan Marshall, Tracks by Robyn Davidson and of course Homer’s Odyssey, where it all started for me reading the Greek myths when I was 9 years old. Throw in some Scotland with Rowena Farres books and fantasy with Anne McCaffrey and you have me summed up. Imagination and travel adventure - the stuff of contagious restlessness.