"travel is a poetic adventure, a method of concrete knowledge, an ordeal, a symboli way to stop growing old, to deny time by crossing space..." --Michel Leiris, L'Afrique fantome, 1934.
I am derailed by the phrase, "to deny time by crossing space." For me, this is the quintessential point of irony for travel, and befitting for my blog that was originally created as a "travel" blog, but from which I soon fled, fearing the cliches of the self-finding traveller that i am now learning to loathe in graduate school. But these words go beyond the travel experience--whether it is the superficial tourist, the ethnographer in the field doing "prestigious" cultural research, or the tired student who scurries off to different cafes in order to feel like time isn't swiftly peeling away. This phrase unites us all.
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