exciting developments in stuff i have been thinking about

I was on the bus last night, sliding through the night as if borne on a magic internal-combustion carpet, and getting a nice burst of mental jazz by the river of lights and the sense that I was bound for a mysterious place, in this case the future.

So I was thinking about this grand feeling we get from road trips and how travelling is just compelling in general. You see the 'I love travel' theme in online personal ads all the time, and I don't think it's only a cliche people are falling back on. They genuinely love their sojourns and their trips and their getaways.

Maybe we love travelling because the journey arc is naturally constituted by a beginning, a middle, and an end. You define some nominal goal (even though 'Life is a journey, not a destination') and then, filled with hope, you launch your ship. Some intervening stuff happens, but barring death, you wind up at a definitive ending in the form of your destination.

Often, with significant expositional effort, we retroactively (or actively) fit our non-travel stories into this structure of start and finish that is already intrinsic to travelling. There's a comfort in knowing when the story begins and when it ends, since from there we can make an educated guess about when we are supposed to learn a lesson. (For those of you setting your tripometers: maybe three quarters of the way there, I would guess.)

Another possible reason for our gusto for travel occurred to me last night as I sat looking out the window. It's not even a theory, just an association or an equation or a something else, but it boils down to this: The narrative of the journey brings your spatial existence in line with your temporal existence. Your temporal life is always moving forward, never backward; you always have a sense of the future as a place that will be reached by a million short, ordered advances. And now, on a journey, you are finally moving in physical space in parallel with that journey in time that you are always taking anyway. The journey in time is always in that single direction, toward the future, and now, with a road trip or a sleeper car on a train bound for anywhere, you are no longer in your quotidian pattern of back and forth from work to home to school to Burger King. Now your route in space is only in that same direction of time, ever to the front. You're going from New York to Amsterdam, Paris to Bangkok, on a direct flight with no turning back, just as you go from Monday to Friday, last year to next year, and the two vectors of time and space are harmonious if only for the duration of the journey.