It’s easy to get stuck in our ruts in the age of the internet, losing our wanderlust.
An old friend, former diplomat and world traveler, recently emailed a somewhat defeatist message: âI have lost my wanderlust lately and my reliance on my memories has increased.â

I understand her completely. Between the restrictions of Covid and the anxiety of finding oneself on an overnight flight to Lisbon seated next to an NRA-spear-carrier (not Paul and Ingrid in Casablanca), I and some of my culturally nettled friends decided to become electronic exiles for the near future.
Access to Internet with its domains and platforms allows us to reach out even as we stay within restricted boundaries. Expansion of our horizons via WWW in a time of political boa-constriction has become gradually our mode of travel. Though our exploratory wings are pinioned, our minds still are airborne on the wings of poetry.
A centrifugal existence has replaced a centripetal one. We hope to restore balance to the equation when our lives return to something like normal and the Reds and the Blues can, well, at least get along.
From the time the âwhilomâ (a word he should look up) dominator encouraged us to quaff a cleaning agent to the present when âpublish or perishâ may be replaced with âperish if you publish the truth about US history,â many imaginary signatories of the Constitution have chosen to lead a kind of samizdat existence.
A few local sciatic emeriti with enlightened views, if we may say so ourselves, have formed a reading group in which we discuss travel literature: Homerâs Odyssey; Dickensâ Travels in America; Hemingwayâs Green Hills of Africa; Freya Starkâs The Journeyâs Echo, A History of the World in 500 WalksâŠ.
In fact, weâve formed two versions of our Junto Club (Ben Franklinâs 1727 circle): in person and Zoom. We meet on a memberâs deck in fair weather and go virtual when itâs inclement or when we wish to add a world-watcher with a different point of view. None of us ever has slept in a yurt and had yogurt for breakfast in the company of camels. Weâre looking for an Inner Mongolia expert.
Somewhat self-imprisoned, we also watch and discuss movies from the time of Buster Keaton through A Night at the Opera and Chaplinâs Modern Times to Woody Allenâs Sleeper, Mel Brooksâ Young Frankenstein, Steve Martinâs Bowfinger, and even the whacky Three Stooges.
Weâre becoming experts in the history of film-comedy in an effort to laugh through the current âculture wars.â We prefer the madcap antics in these movies to the verbal brickbats being hurled in Congress by some atavistic members who confuse rational debate with Mixed Martial Arts in which the âloyal oppositionâ becomes the âMasked Caveman from Canarsie.â
There are unplanned benefits as well: our group, only colleagues at first, has become friends; raised in the age of the type-writer, if not the quill, our tech skills have improved, even if we think that âartificial intelligenceâ still means âa substitution of slogans for thought.â Orwellâs 1984 is one of our secular-sacred books.
Thereâs biological and literary precedent for our burrowing in and imagining a life out-there during a âwinter of our discontent.â Artic foxes hibernate under the ice and donât emerge until a touch of spring is in the air, and John Keats wrote famously about the possibilities and pleasures of travel through poetry in âOn First Looking into Chapmanâs Homerâ:
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Keats (1795-1821) never got to Greece, but he had been there in his poetic imagination. As much as we might long to leave âon a jet planeâ and ânot come back againâ until America becomes functionally unified, weâre doing our best to expand our global panorama through the light-filled vistas that literature and film make possible for our group to see together. Not holding out for a âglorious summer,â weâre waiting simply for âmore lightâ (Goetheâs last words).
Howard R. Wolf is the author o Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile and A Version of Home: Letters from the World (an autobiographical journey). He has written extensively about Henry James and George Orwell â two guardians of the English language.
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