The Saddest
Pleasure
"I'm going to wind
it up. Call it a day."
"Whatever for?"
"I'm too old to travel, for one thing."
"Which Frenchman said, 'Travel is the saddest of pleasures'?"
"It gave me eyes."
Paul Theroux
Travel has always been the saddest of pleasures for me. New landscapes, new cultures, new worlds. Adventures, revelations, the saddest of partings. As a young man, I always thought I could return to a place over and over: "I'll be back". Sometimes I did return; to the Galapagos Islands, for example, or Argentine Patagonia. But as the years add up, I now more often bid farewell to a place knowing that there ís no going back.
Remembered journeys - Yellowstone National Park
I remember one night, sharing some beers in a dark and freezing bar with the postmaster
of a God-forsaken mining town, San Antonio de los Cobres, on Argentina's Andean-backbone
boundary with Chile, just south of the Bolivian line. He said he liked me and my
companion, and, in all seriousness, he would try someday to ride his burro to Montana
to visit us. When we had consumed the last beer, we excused ourselves, thanking him
for his companionship and telling him we hoped to see him next time we made it to
San Antonio. "You won't be back," he insisted. "They all say they'll
be back, but not a single traveler has ever returned."
I never returned.
The photos I'm sharing here are a nearly random selection of places that have meant
a lot to me, and that continue to haunt me to this day. Most of them are in South
America. There are stories behind every photo, of course, but there is no room here
for those stories. I share them with you as a simple reminder of how beautiful, how
precious, and how fleeting our world is.
I am like a distracted
child
Whom they drag by the hand
Through the fiesta of the world.
My eyes cling, sadly, to things...
And what misery when they tear me away from them!
Juan Ramon Jimenez
