Hope you’ll take a look at my previous blog and the excellent review of Voice of a Voyage!
As I stated last week, this blog consists of the epigraphs from Chapters 9 through 16 that I used in Voice of a Voyage: Rediscovering the World During a Ten-year Circumnavigation. The chapter titles are included before their epigraph(s), but not the section titles. What I think will interest you is the various “takes” on travel that these quotations represent. I did make some “editorial” comments also. Add yours too in the Comments section.
9 Sri Lanka and Yemen: Tea vs. Qat
What would the world do without tea?—how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
—Sydney Smith, Lady Holland’s Memoir
[DHA: Can you imagine anything more Brit? But Sri Lanka and Assam, India are not only the greatest tea cultivators but also tea drinkers.]
Sri Lanka: Tamil women tea pluckers at a tea “garden.”
10 The Red Sea: Combat, Concrete, and Camels
Now my heart turns this way and that, as I think what the people say [and] those who shall see my monuments in years to come and who shall speak of what I have done.
—Hatshepsut, King of Egypt, 1504–1458 BCE
[DHA: Hatshepsut is a fascinating story. She was the king! You’ll have to read Voice of a Voyage or Google it to get the details, but it’s worth it.]
11 The Eastern Med: Thousand-page Stories
Let all scribes and poets
Write down their wisdom
About the past and the future
Let the whole world learn about it,
Still something will remain understated
The numerous hardships borne by the Cretans.
Because on this island each family
Could write a thousand-page story.
—Saying in Cretan house at Lychnostatis, Cretan Open-Air Museum
Crete, Greece: A most amazing contemporary Greek sculpture, which I’ll tell you more about next week.
12 Greece and Italy: Trials of a Journey
Hold back,…Back from brutal war!
Break off—shed no more blood—make peace at once!
—Homer, The Odyssey [Athena commanding Odysseus, Telemachus, and the unworthy suitors of Penelope]
[DHA: If only we would heed her advice today!]
13 The Western Med: Entrance as an Exit
This Arabic-Islamic science and technology, reaching Europe ‘via Sicily and Spain’ awoke her from the Dark Ages in which she was slumbering.
—Stanford Cobb, Islamic Contributions to Civilization
[DHA: Every country rewrites its actual history; Spain is no exception.]
14 Entering the Atlantic: A Multitude of Drops
“And only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!”
“Yet, what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”
—David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
[DHA: David Mitchell is an extremely creative author, but for me these are the best lines in this entire book.]
15 Eastern Caribbean and Bahamas: Sorrow Hides in Nostalgia
Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
—Miriam Beard
[DHA: Exactly!]
16 A Wandering Song
There are no words to the song of the ocean, but the message is and always has been simple: not to forget where we came from. The melody is locked in the water that composes much of what we are. Most humans tend to ignore the song, but not all. You are one of the lucky ones who hold the melody in your heart. But be warned: it is a wandering song carried by the winds and the currents.
—Jimmy Buffett, A Salty Piece of Land
None of it is important or all of it is.
—John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
[DHA: I am one of the “lucky ones,” and John Steinbeck, not surprisingly, nails it.]
As I asked in my last blog, let me know if you have a favorite quote about travel. Also, I’m curious to know if this piques your interest in Voice of a Voyage: Rediscovering the World During a Ten-year Circumnavigation?