The journey is my heartbeat in this plane

I read this poem early in my trip, and thought of it again in a plane heading to Davao - a flight in some ways more daring and profound than my long haul across the Pacific, and yet an utterly prosaic trip.  I looked in my emotions and found not a trace of profundity, wondered at the absence, stared out the window, checked my watch.  Was I feeling what I ought to have been feeling?

A funny question, no?


The Journey is Everything

Montaigne believed the journey, in itself,
Was the idea.  Yet from this moving plane
I look down on the dazzle of the world,

Conscious of his words but wondering
When, when shall I be here, at journey's end?
The journey, said Montaigne, is everything.

Two hours ago the setting out began
With words of love.  It is too soon to be
In love with landscape, altering below --

The flight upriver and the dwindling hills --
As if I came for this, a traveler,
And every wisp of cloud were an obsession.

It is too soon  The journey is myself,
Concerned with where I was, where I must go,
Not with the clouds about me (what of them?),

Not with the morning skies -- nor would Montaigne
Have noticed them, his mind on other things.
The journey is my heartbeat in this plane.

Yet with more time?  Were the excursion longer
to the Cote d'Azur et d'Or, perhaps, La Mer,
the hyacinth fields of Haarlem, Tanganyika,

The river Lethe or the Serpentine,
The fortunate Isles or Nepal -- anywhere,
I might discover what his words still mean:

The journey, in itself, a thing apart.
But no.  These words are older than Montaigne's:
The sky is changed.  I have not changed my heart.

Helen Bevington