Travel Makes Life Feel Longer

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Why is it that, after years at home, stuck in the back-and-forth of your domestic routine, or in the ups and downs of your job, you spend a week traveling somewhere pleasant or strange, and that one week blazes larger in your memory than all those years? This happens to me often: Travel appears to offer an enlargement of time. And it's not just me. The clerk at my post office can recall in detail her 10 days in Hawaii and the pineapple ice cream she ate on the sunny shore many years earlier. Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers unpacks the sojourn across an unusually long travel book, while D.H. Lawrence rambled for nine days in Sardinia in 1921; his book about the experience, Sea and Sardinia, rambles on for hundreds of pages.

Hyperbole might explain such literary fattening, but I can't rid my mind of the feeling that, in travel, time itself is amplified, especially in retrospect.

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