Last week I read “Night Train to Lisbon” by Pascal Mercier. It’s a very good novel; it’s one of those rare books (whether fiction or non-fiction) that makes you think. The novel is about a Swiss teacher of classical languages who becomes obsessed with a book by a (fictional) Portuguese doctor, Amadeu do Prado. A substantial part of the book consists of quotations from Prado. This is an example (p. 243):

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find only by going back there. We go to ourselves, travel to ourselves, when the monotonous beat of the wheels brings us to a place where we have covered a stretch of our lives, no matter how brief it may have been. When we set foot for the second time on the platform of the foreign railroad station, hear the voices over the loudspeaker, smell the unique odors, we have come not only to the distant place, but also to the distance of our own inside, to a perhaps thoroughly remote corner of our self, which, when we are somewhere else, is completely in the dark and invisible. … It is an error, a nonsensical act of violence, to concentrate on the here and now with the conviction of thus grasping the essential. What matters is to move surely and calmly, with the appropriate humor and the appropriate melancholy in the temporally and spatially internal landscape that we are. Why do we feel sorry for people who can’t travel? Because, unable to expand externally, they are not able to expand internally either, they can’t multiply and so they are deprived of the possibility of undertaking expansive excursions in themselves and discovering who and what else they could have become.”

The above quotation hits the nail on my experience of traveling but which I had never been able to express. Psychologists (and behavioral economists) like to speak about how individuals have multiple personalities, and about the tensions that exist when one of the personalities attempts to control the others. But the role of location is never explored. I think that since places are associated with specific institutions and interpersonal networks (as well as nature, climate and so on), it forces upon the spatially defined individual a choice concerning which institutions, networks, and natural conditions to accept and maybe even encourage (in oneself), and which to reject and perhaps rebel against. Certainly that (seems to?) have been my experience.