"Questions of Travel" is the title poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1965 collection about her travels to Brazil with her partner Lota de Macedo Soares. Soares, with whom Bishop had been in a relationship for 16 years, died just two years after the publication of the book, having been hospitalized for mental health problems In New York, where she took an overdose of tranquillizers the day she arrived and never recovered.

Against the backdrop of that tragic love story this poem takes on a deeper meaning. Bishop was a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner in 1956 and won many other literary awards during her career. She lived in France in the 1930s and in South America in the 50s and 60s. The poem outlines how essential travel seems to be for human beings. How we cannot just stay home. How we must always strive "to see the sun the other way around".

Over the past 50 years travel has been commoditized in package tours and well-trodden paths and, more recently, the rise of the Instagram location. That is, of course, not travel. The economic and financial theorist and commentatory Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about the theory of touristification, where everything is managed to remove discomfort. Discomfort, of course, is an essential part of true travel. Because it is only through discomfort that we see the world, and ourselves, in new and different and essential ways.

You can read the poem here

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