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Statistics, for whatever they’re
worth, tell us the average Usonian (Frank Lloyd Wright’s
coinage for residents of what we too carelessly refer
to as "America") changes residence every five
years or so.
Not to mention travel, which
everyone now seems to do, for business and for pleasure,
for work and for leisure, often both at once and occasionally
neither. As Bill Jorden points out in this premiere
issue’s lead article, "Spiritual Tourism,"
tourism is the explosive growth industry of the past
decade. Factor in the international refugee crisis,
and it sometimes seems as if everyone now is endlessly
in motion. Hence this journal’s title. Its purpose
is simple: to provide a forum for accounts of personal
experiences of travel, past and present, in all moods
and modes.
Most of my own travel is work-related
– I’m a writer, teacher, lecturer and occasional
consultant – so a real vacation for me means staying
home and sleeping in own bed for weeks in row. Yet I
pack a good bit of sightseeing and cultural exploration
into my professional travel, as many of us have learned
to do, often tacking some extra personal time onto the
professional schedule. But I once flew to Paris for
a weekend conference simply because someone paid my
way and between conference sessions I could have café
au lait and croissants in the Marais two straight
mornings before flying back home.
In the past decade I’ve
spent time in France (the City of Light and the Cote
d’Azur, mostly), Spain, the former Soviet Union,
the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Mexico, Finland,
Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Canada, and all over
the U.S. Most of this has been by car and plane; yet
my favorite means of travel remain the train and the
boat. To me, those vehicles speak most immediately to
the joys of travel itself as an experience – not
the excitement or other inducements of the destination,
but the complex engagement with the process of getting
there, that sense of suspended time. Features we're
planning for future issues will take up some of the
specific qualities of one or another form of transportation
from highly personal perspectives.
This journal was created as an
outlet for people who, even if they’re experienced
writers, are for the most part not professional travel
writers. Whatever their reason for going wherever they’ve
gone and will tell you about in this and future issues,
it won’t be because we paid them to go. On this
maiden voyage, Bill Jorden takes us on a quick pilgrim’s
tour to sacred spots and power places around the world;
Robert Huszar gives us a water-level view of a long-lived
kayak rally in Poland, of all places; and Rose Hartman
introduces us to the sybaritic pleasures of life on
the beach in St. Barts. We also debut several of our
regular features: "Time Travelers" presents a series
of vintage voyages, the first of which is Sarah Kemble
Knight's "On Horseback From Boston To New York In 1704";
"Footloose: The Motion Picture Book" opens our "family
album" of vintage travel photos and postcards from all
over; and "Connecting Flights: Our Travelinks" offers
useful links to other travel-related sites.
In his classic essay "The
Storyteller," Walter Benjamin distinguishes between
two basic archetypes of the storyteller: the "resident
tiller of the soil," who can give us "the
lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives
of a place," and the "trading seaman,"
who carries around "the lore of faraway places,
such as a much-traveled man brings home." The contents
of this journal will move along that axis, responding
variously to the tug of both its poles.
By choice or by default, more
and more people in our time function as someone’s
foreign correspondent, even if only in letters and postcards
sent home from summer or winter vacation. What we intend
to bring you is a rich stew of material that in one
way or another addresses the seduction of elsewhere
and the imperative of motion.
/s/ A. D. Coleman
Editor-in-Chief
August 1, 1998
P.S. Your comments are always
welcome. If you’re willing to let us post them,
please indicate that by putting "Motion POB"
in the subject area of your e-mail.
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