Travelling is a fool’s paradise.

The phrase comes near the end of “Self-Reliance”, where Emerson turns to the “superstition of Travelling”. The soul, he says, “is no traveller; the wise man stays at home”. He does not object to going round the globe for art, study or benevolence, if the traveller is “first domesticated”; but whoever travels to be amused “travels away from himself” and carries “ruins to ruins”. Then the line, and its illustration: at home I dream that at Naples or Rome I shall lose my sadness; I wake up in Naples, “and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from”. “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

After his young wife’s death and his resignation from the ministry, Emerson had sailed for Europe at the end of 1832 and passed through Naples and Rome in 1833. The essay appeared in 1841 in his first series of Essays.

The phrase is now a favourite of stay-at-homes, though Emerson’s target is not travel but the hope of escaping oneself by it.

Self-Reliance (Essays), 1841

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