To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.
Interpretation
Travel enhances creativity and imagination, distinguishing it from mere illusion and suffering.
This quote by Louis-Ferdinand Celine emphasizes the profound impact of travel on one's imagination and creativity. It suggests that while many experiences in life can lead to delusion and pain, the act of traveling fosters a genuine creative journey that is rooted in the strength of our imagination, allowing us to transcend mere physical experiences and explore deeper realms of thought and emotion.
In practice
During a travel workshop, I shared, 'To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain.'
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, itβs indispensable.
Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself
Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.
Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all it's richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space. You return a different person.
So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
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