"All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal"
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Le Gallienne takes a tired travel proverb and quietly breaks it open. “All roads indeed lead to Rome” lands like a concession to common sense: yes, history has its imperial centers, its destinations everyone recognizes. Then he swerves. “But theirs also” signals a second itinerary running beneath the obvious one. The sentence starts to mist, and that’s the point: a poet is less interested in where you end up than in the strange extra meaning you accrue by moving at all.
The key word is “mystical,” which doesn’t just mean religious. It means private, half-inarticulate, stubbornly resistant to the map. By calling it “some bourne of which no traveller knows the name,” he invokes the tradition of the “undiscovered country” and the fin-de-siecle appetite for the symbolic: destinations that are felt before they’re known. Rome is an address; the other place is a pressure, a pull. It’s also a subtle elevation of the artist’s route over the tourist’s. Ordinary roads converge on an empire; the poet’s roads converge on an experience you can’t photograph, only hint at.
That verb, “hint,” matters. The travelers “seem to hint” at an “even more eternal” city, as if eternity is not a doctrine but a rumor shared among wanderers. Le Gallienne is writing in a period when modern life was accelerating and secularizing; the subtext is a refusal to let the world become purely logistical. Even in an age of timetables, he insists, the deepest journey still ends in the unnameable.
The key word is “mystical,” which doesn’t just mean religious. It means private, half-inarticulate, stubbornly resistant to the map. By calling it “some bourne of which no traveller knows the name,” he invokes the tradition of the “undiscovered country” and the fin-de-siecle appetite for the symbolic: destinations that are felt before they’re known. Rome is an address; the other place is a pressure, a pull. It’s also a subtle elevation of the artist’s route over the tourist’s. Ordinary roads converge on an empire; the poet’s roads converge on an experience you can’t photograph, only hint at.
That verb, “hint,” matters. The travelers “seem to hint” at an “even more eternal” city, as if eternity is not a doctrine but a rumor shared among wanderers. Le Gallienne is writing in a period when modern life was accelerating and secularizing; the subtext is a refusal to let the world become purely logistical. Even in an age of timetables, he insists, the deepest journey still ends in the unnameable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Journey |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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