“My life has always been more in books and dreams” said Lawrence Durrell somewhere about himself, and, it seems, this is how my own life is turning out, in the end. For over a year now, it has been a book a day for me, just about. On some days, I end one and open the next in the same sitting.
Yesterday was Michael Moran’s turn. He starts with a good epigraph:
I have always thought the situation of a Traveller singularly hard. If he tells nothing that is uncommon he must be a stupid fellow to have gone so far, and brought home so very little; and if he does, why — it is hum – aya – a tap on the Chin; — and — “He’s a Traveller”. (From the diary of William Wales, Astronomer and Meteorologist on Captain Cook’s second voyage).
Moran elucidates the point further, as it were, with a bit on Dr Johnson, about whom:
his adventurous friend James Boswell records that Johnson was skeptical of what a traveler might learn by taking long voyages, despite on one occasion when dining with the Reverend Alexander Grant at Invernes, divertingly “standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo”, and making “three vigorous bounds across the room”.
The rest of the book serves to exemplify the claim.
Oltre Mare 