Reflections on Hesse, Home and the Call of the Road
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 01.10.02 | 2:35 AM ET
Paul Bateman returned home from 18 months of mind-expanding world travel years ago only to feel lost, uneasy and homesick for the road. He wrote desperate letters, hundreds of them, to travelers he had met, expressing doubt and confusion. One sent back a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Wandering. In today’s Melbourne Age, Bateman eloquently recalls the book’s effect on his life and meditates on the many meanings of home. “When I read this little book,” he writes, “I fell in love with a simple idea and vowed that I would live by it: I was a nomad, not a farmer; I would escape to the world ‘that they steal me away from’; I would flee back home ‘down a thousand close paths’; I would take to the road once more. Except that I never did.”
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
