Parenting & Family Quote by Ella Maillart

Travel, for Maillart, is less about distance than about deprogramming. The line lands as a rebuke to the modern habit of treating experience like a checklist: cities “done,” landscapes “seen,” cultures consumed and summarized. Her intent is corrective. She argues that motion through the world can restore a perceptual freshness adulthood trains out of us: the child’s capacity to be arrested by what is right in front of them.

The subtext is that wonder is not a personality trait; it’s a discipline under threat. “Learn once more” implies it was lost, not never possessed. And it was lost through the very forces Maillart’s era accelerated: routine, speed, and the hardening pragmatism of interwar Europe, when survival and ideology made curiosity feel indulgent. Her travel writing emerged from long overland journeys across Central Asia at a time when borders, empires, and ideas were violently shifting. In that context, wonder becomes quietly political: to marvel is to refuse cynicism as a default setting, to resist being flattened into a mere instrument of history.

The second sentence narrows the blessing to “the poet, the artist,” but it’s also a standard she holds up to everyone. The artist isn’t praised for producing objects; they’re praised for maintaining a mental state. “Keep alive” reads like triage. Wonder is something that can die, something that needs protection from familiarity, from the adult reflex to explain everything immediately. Maillart frames travel as one tool for that protection: not escapism, but recalibration.