Notes On A Writing Life 27
July 14 2021

Dear All,

I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between writing and moving about the world, during this time when so few of us have been able to go anywhere. How much does free movement inspire our work? Apart from travel writers, of course, whose stock-in-trade is movement – do we free up our minds when we embark on journeys to new places, when we fly above the earth or cross seas and boundaries and experience other countries? I think so. The Australian writer Christina Stead once wrote ‘My imagination really starts to operate at 33,000 feet.” I have often felt the same. The plane soars from the ground and you leave behind your earthly concerns and obligations, your seat belt fastened, and only the sky around you, deepening blue as you rise through the clouds that wrap the earth.

There are, of course, many writers who couldn’t and didn’t do anything like this. Think of the Brontës, famously plodding across the moor around Haworth. Think of Jane Austen, at home, always at home. Think of writers in prison. But we 20th and 21st-century writers have become used to freely roaming about the world, going where we decide we want to go. Pascal may have been right when he said that all our ills come from not being able to sit alone in a room – but most writers, who spend a lot of time in that room, also long for the freedom to get out of it.

I am writing this when I’m about to try to fly to England, with my husband, in among a welter of details to be seen to: Covid tests both here and there, quarantine, documents to prove who we are and where we will be. I say ‘try’ because nothing is certain any more – or maybe we just know now that this is so. Travel is no longer the easy thing of our youth, when to cross the Atlantic or to wander around Europe you only had to buy a ticket (or stick out your thumb.) National boundaries constrain us, and I for one don’t think that they are good for writers. We need always to see how other people live, hear other languages, read other literatures, literally change views. Lockdown may have been good for concentration; so many people sat down to write in 2020 because there wasn’t an excuse not to, or to keep themselves sane. But now? I long for that moment of leaving the earth and taking off into the blue. I’ll settle back and let my mind loose, see what occurs, and by the time I’ve landed at Heathrow hope that like Christina Stead, I’ll have the germ of a new idea, a phrase, even a dream or the hint of one, to carry back to earth.

“ I also long to set my foot on an unknown path, to go somewhere I have never been before, to round a corner and see the landscape unfold – as my brother Richard and I did in 2018 when we last walked a section of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, through a wild and beautiful part of France. ”

I also long to set my foot on an unknown path, to go somewhere I have never been before, to round a corner and see the landscape unfold – as my brother Richard and I did in 2018 when we last walked a section of the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, through a wild and beautiful part of France. The memory is always there, as the postcard of that turning path, disappearing among trees, is pinned up above my desk, in the room in which I have recently spent so many of my days. But the reality – ah, that’s the draw. Pilgrims and nomads know it. Walking across countryside, as people did for centuries, the mind and body come together, eyes and ears are refreshed, and the imagination runs free.

Let’s travel safely – but let’s travel still.

Affectionately, Ros