Fernando Pessoa, through the weary consciousness of Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet, casts a long shadow over the idea of travel. He distrusts movement, questions distance, and insists that crossing borders rarely changes the self. Wherever we go, he suggests, we bring the same interior weather with us. The same anxieties. The same dissatisfactions. The same unfinished self.
And yet—people still travel. I still travel. Not in spite of Pessoa, but almost because of him.
Pessoa is right about one thing: travel is not salvation. It does not cure restlessness. It does not automatically grant wisdom. A flight ticket is not a rite of passage, and a stamp in a passport is not proof of growth. If we travel only to escape ourselves, we will fail. The self is excellent at sneaking into hand luggage.
But Pessoa’s doubt doesn’t make travel meaningless. It strips it of illusion—and that is where its real value begins.
Travel matters not because it transforms us, but because it tests us. It confronts our assumptions with friction: unfamiliar rhythms, moral ambiguities, linguistic limits, discomfort, beauty that does not perform for us. Unlike imagination—which Pessoa mastered—real places resist our projections. They push back. Streets don’t care about our expectations. History doesn’t simplify itself. People refuse to be symbols.
Pessoa believed imagination could replace movement. And perhaps for him, it could. But imagination without encounter risks becoming circular—brilliant, but sealed. Travel breaks that seal. It introduces error, surprise, contradiction. It forces recalibration.
Travel also matters because it relocates attention. Even if we remain fundamentally the same person, we notice differently elsewhere. The banal becomes visible: how tea is poured, how time is kept, how silence works in a room. Pessoa observed Lisbon with microscopic care. Travel allows us to practice that same attentiveness in places where habit has not yet numbed us.
There is also an ethical dimension Pessoa largely avoided: the world is not abstract. It is uneven, wounded, alive. To travel—carefully, humbly, without conquest—is to acknowledge complexity beyond the self. It is to accept that one’s inner life is not the sole universe worth contemplating.
And finally, travel matters because it creates memory anchored to place. Not postcards, not clichés, but moments where geography and consciousness briefly align: a conversation that could only happen there, a light that exists only at that latitude, a silence shaped by that particular history. These moments do not redeem us—but they deepen us.
Pessoa doubts travel because he demands too much from it. He wants transcendence. Travel offers something quieter: context.
So yes, we remain ourselves wherever we go. But we return with sharper edges, better questions, and a more honest sense of scale. And that, even Pessoa might concede, is not nothing.
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