Emigrants who traveled the Oregon Trail understood they were living in an important part of history. That’s one reason many of them kept diaries. We study what they wrote to understand life as they knew it. Likewise, one day people will want to know what it was like going through the coronavirus pandemic. They will learn of quarantine, social distancing, panic buying, and grocery shortages. We are going through momentous times.
Have you wondered how, when we emerge from this trial, life-as-we-know-it will have changed? I suspect that despite valuing hearth and home, we’ll want to go elsewhere. After months of lock-down, that’s only natural.
You don’t have to wait. Indulge in armchair travel right now. Play music from the Greek Isles, settle in with a mezze platter, and escape into a good book set in Greece. That’s one example. There are all sorts of books with lots of settings. Just think what you could do! Want to travel into classic novels? Go ahead! Crack open that copy of Jane Eyre, Jamaica Inn, or Ivanhoe. Wouldn’t it be fun to put together tea and cakes, a tankard of ale and a Cornish pie, or a medieval feast?
Lean back in that armchair, close your eyes, and dream of where to travel once the lockdown ends. Would you go to your ancestral land, the setting of a favorite book, or to visit loved ones? Can you come up with any weekend trips? How about a road-trip adventure? Write down your thoughts to consult when it’s possible to make solid plans. Until then, there is nowhere that books can’t take you.
If you want to know what I’m reading, sign up for the Creative Worlds of Janalyn Voigt mostly-monthly newsletter. Until we meet again, I’ll leave you with Longfellow’s thoughts on armchair travel. He didn’t actually call it that, but it’s what he meant. Enjoy!
Travels by the Fireside
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The ceaseless rain is falling fast,
And yonder gilded vane,
Immovable for three days past,
Points to the misty main,
It drives me in upon myself
And to the fireside gleams,
To pleasant books that crowd my shelf,
And still more pleasant dreams,
I read whatever bards have sung
Of lands beyond the sea,
And the bright days when I was young
Come thronging back to me.
In fancy I can hear again
The Alpine torrent’s roar,
The mule-bells on the hills of Spain,
The sea at Elsinore.
I see the convent’s gleaming wall
Rise from its groves of pine,
And towers of old cathedrals tall,
And castles by the Rhine.
I journey on by park and spire,
Beneath centennial trees,
Through fields with poppies all on fire,
And gleams of distant seas.
I fear no more the dust and heat,
No more I feel fatigue,
While journeying with another’s feet
O’er many a lengthening league.
Let others traverse sea and land,
And toil through various climes,
I turn the world round with my hand
Reading these poets’ rhymes.
From them I learn whatever lies
Beneath each changing zone,
And see, when looking with their eyes,
Better than with mine own.
