Resources: Quotes from books
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Harcourt Inc. 1972.
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in the unfamiliar cities, the more one understood the cities that he had crossed to arrive there; and he retracted the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square in Venice where he gamboled as a child.
"it was to slough off a burden of nostalgia that you went so far away"
"to rise over a deep, subterranean lake"
"a name for city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes"
"spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking form"
"an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things we want to remember"
"memory is redundant; it repeats signs so the city can begin to exist "
"the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions; on each new face you encounter, it prints the old forms"
Robinson, Jane, ed. Unsuitable for the Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1994.
p. xi: Introduction by Jane Robinson
It is surreal picture: in the distanceI can see rather a bizarre collection of women, quite a few in dull-coloured Victorian garb with a variety of bonnets, sola tropis, and veils; one or two in the heavy habits of the Middle Ages (or even earlier) and several elaborately upholstered in glancing satin finery; there are some in shorts or trousers, perhaps men's; some in medical or military uniform; now and again there is even the odd flowery sun-dress or flash of Lycra to be seen. There must be well over a hundred altogether, and the noise, although muffled by the distance, is considerable. Each seems to be hauling or tugging at something: some sort of rope, I think, and as I trace the tangling lines I realize that they are all connected to me, sitting here in the foreground. I am perching slightly perilously in a fat and complacent armchair and these women, now hazy against the horizon, are lugging me along in it...This is the breif and strangely familiar vision that occupied my mind as soon as I was asked to edit this anthology.
p. 3: Lady Helen Dufferin in Lispings from Low Latitudes, 1863
Dear, dear 'Abroad!' your image is henceforth connected with the memory of my sainted parents, whose portraits seem to bend from their frames, and to smile in mild approval of my determination.
p. 5: Jane Robinson
There is a fine line to be drawn between the urge to travel and the search for freedom, and for many of these women no line at all. So it is with the need to find new places and to discover a new self. Sometimes just to travel and to travel alone, is enough of an end to justify the means.
p. 6: Lady Florence Dixie, Across Patagonia, 1880
What was the attraction in going to an outlandish place so many miles away?...Precisely because it was an outlandish place and so far away, I chose it. Palled for the moment with civilisation and its surroundings, I wanted to escape somewhere, where I might be as far removed from them as possible. Many of my readers have doubless felt the dissatisfaction of oneself, and everybody else, that comes over one at times in the midst of the pleasures of life, when one wearies of the shallow artificiality of modern existence...
p. 16: Evelyn Cheesman, Time Well Spend, 1960
It use to be bewildering to be told when I came back, 'How I envy you!'...What exactly are the waiting for? What did they lack—the Urge? Long ago I decided that such people possessed only an embryonic Urge which didn't carry them far enough. They didn't spell Urge reverently with a capital letter as some of us do...As for the Urge—no, I must allow that comes from something much deeper down in the mind, something pre-natal perhaps.
p. 8: Isabel Savory, A Sportswoman in India, 1900
Too often travelling is a Fool's Paradise. I am miserable; I want to get out of myself; I want to leave home. Travel! I pack up my trunks, say Farewell, I depart. I go to the ends of the earth; and behold, my skeleton steps out of its cup-board and confronts me there. I am as pessimistic as ever, for the last thing I can lose is myself; and though I may tramp to the back of the beyond, that grim shadow much always pursue me.
