The Greater Journey...

For companions, I have invited a few other well-known Americans: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse, Emma Willard, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles Sumner, to name a few.  They accompany me in literary form, although they speak in their own words through journal entries and letters collected together by David McCullough in his book The Greater Journey, Americans in Paris.  They, too, took books on their ocean voyages--great black trunks of them to be read in the calmer weeks at sea.  These Americans traveled in the 1830's when their own country, my country, was just a little more than 50 years old.  Many of the "Americans in Paris" featured in the book returned home to change the course of their native history.  Abolition, and higher education advocacy for women were among the ideas furthered by some.  They were artists, writers, and educators seeking to expand their world view.  They sailed on sailing ships, in dangerous waters for weeks at a time.  The journey from LeHavre, where they arrived, to Paris central took 24 hours-- longer than it is taking me at this moment to wing my way from Los Angeles, presently high above Nebraska, changing planes in Chicago, and landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport all in about 18 hours total.  A comment written the The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving compared traveling on the ocean to traveling across the prairies, as the Western movement was calling these same Bostonians.  Irving says land travel keeps the traveler connected to the reality of home through the continuity of scene, as he called it.  Whereas sea travel disconnects the traveler, throwing him (often literally) into a timeless expanse of horizon that severs him from home.  Irving:   It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life.."  Imagine, then, air travel!  I am encased in a tube in the clouds with an occasional bumpy necessity for seat belt snapping.  Before I have time to say my mental good-byes to land and kin, I will be on the foreign shore searching for the kiosk I have been told will make RER tickets available to "Paris par Train".  Hardly time for contemplation of distance, time, or shift in culture!  And after that shortened night with airplane sleep we will say, as those long-ago Americans whom we shadow, wrote in their journals, "Voila Paris!"