Let us approach travel as dualistic, defining it by what it is not. Travel is, most importantly, not being home. This is to say, travel can be differentiated from Nomadism in that there always exists a 'home' from which one has left, and to which one will presumably return.
(In the modern world, travel is usually Defined by Home; one leaves for a set, usually predetermined, period of time, wherein one is 'traveling,' and then returns.)
It is clear that Travels' significance derives from it's foreignness. One can only recognize foreignness (and therefore travel) by having a frame of reference - here 'Home'- for which to make comparisons. Like movement in general, foreignness is relative; we need the fixed road to determine speed, we need Home to determine Other.
But here we reach a problem, because Home is conceptual, a thing we carry with us in our heads.
Whereas velocity is measured by fixed, physical constants, in travel we are comparing the experienced with the remembered - two unstable and subjective sources of comparison.
A concept of Home is multi-faceted and holistic- it is composed not only of location, but of relationships, smells, events, memories, - in short, a collection of unverifiable 'feelings.'
Travel has always been viewed as an opportunity to evaluate and take stock of these collected Feelings, which together may be said to compose a "Home-myth." Travel, simply by putting distance between oneself and the Home-myth, changes it's dynamic, forges doubt and introspection. Like seeing a map of a familiar place for the first time, The Home-myth from a distance reveals previously unknown problems, values, and truths.
In small doses this distancing is inarguably healthy. While the lucid nature of the Home-myth
makes it fragile, a week or month of traveling is hardly enough time to force a shattering.
But prolonged travel causes something else to happen. First, the concept of Home, like anything held in the head, becomes faded, altered, changed. Second, people back home die, get married, and grow in ways that render the concept flawed, no longer a representation of the still-there, but rather a memory of the left-behind.
Time and distance make the Home-concept cloudy, while change renders it inaccurate.
And here the problems begin.
With the original Home-concept fading, the constantly traveled person struggles to find new frames of reference... new ways to judge the newly foreign he encounters. Suddenly, the references for locating foreign become prior foreigns, and travel takes a step towards Nomadism.
But if travel has the effect of unveiling the Home-myth, then further travel acts to paradoxicaly unveil the Foreign-myth without displacing one from the foreign. The effect is a forced state of detachment. Foreignness gives unfamiliar objects meaning - it defines them as other and lets us relate to them, whether that be in joy or disgust. But unmasked objects just present themselves, like photos without captions. The constant travel cannot judge what he sees, and so travel degrades to mere movement.
This loss of the Home-concept is neither tangible nor abrupt. It is an inevitable, gradual forgetting, a process where the familiarity of the original Home-myth is replaced by a familiarity with the foreign, but without the motivation (or ability) to internalize it, to transform it into un-foreign. TO accept the foreign as normal is to accept a new home.
But travel, as we have already said, always has a return in mind The foreign must remain foreign, internalization prevents return. What could be worse than returning to that faintly flickering memory of Home, only to find that YOU, that YOUR concepts of normal, changed more than hers?
Internalization in movement equals Nomadism, in stagnation it is expatriateism. There is no middle ground.
