I love this poem by Cesare Pavese.
Traveling is a brutaality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky — all things tending toward the eternal, or what we imagine of it.
“Little child,
it would have been better
if you had stayed in the fire.
You have nothing of your mother
but her sad human form.
You are the son
of a blinding
but cruel light,
and you’ll have to live in a world
of pale and anguished darkness,
of corrupted flesh,
of sighs and fevers –
everything comes to you from the Radiant….
The snakes will watch over you.”
(Cesare Pavese, from “Dialogues With Leuco”)