Although I often yearn for the wide life of travel, traveling is a poor road to go seeking more wealth of experience. As soon as I reach my new coordinates, I feel the inescapable shallowness of travel. I have no friends in this exotic place, no history, no job, am a member of no gardening club or church committee. I do not go to dinner parties but watch them through windows on solitary walks. I have not entered life but left it. Traveler's anomie points my yearning homeward, back to the place where I am a node in society's network, linked to life by the rich rhythms of my routines, where every street and building remind me of something I did once, where my experience, if narrower, is deeper. The same desire to participate in life that led me from home, leads me back home.

The joy of traveling is to be where you haven't been. The joy of home is to be where you have always been. Thus we destroy the joy of traveling by attaining it, since visiting the unknown makes it known, but we deepen the joy of home by being home, since every year adds fibers to our roots.

We love where we live and lust where we don't. Home is our wife, travel is our mistress. We boomerang on brief adulteries to faraway places, seeking their elegance, fleeing their emptiness.