I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I…

The passage comes from the “Upper Gévaudan” section of Travels with a Donkey, on the third day of the walk. Stevenson’s heart is still “as cold as a potato” towards Modestine, the donkey. The wind blows so hard that he must hold the pack with one hand from Cheylard to Luc, and the country is “one of the most beggarly” he knows. And then, “For my part”, comes the line, continued at once: to move is “to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot”.

Stevenson made the twelve-day journey in the autumn of 1878, at twenty-seven, and published the book the next year. He was in love with Fanny Osbourne, a married American who had gone back to California; he followed her there in 1879 and married her in 1880.

The line is now the motto of travellers who prefer the road to the destination, and Stevenson’s route is a marked long-distance path, the Chemin de Stevenson.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1879

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work