"Traveling is one expression of the desire to cross boundaries"
About this Quote
Travel, in A. B. Yehoshua's framing, isn’t a leisure purchase or a personality trait; it’s a symptom. The line works because it downgrades the romantic Instagram version of movement into something more elemental: a restlessness aimed at borders themselves. “One expression” is the quiet tell. It implies the urge to cross boundaries is primary, while travel is merely one socially acceptable outlet among others: love, politics, art, war, conversion, even betrayal. The sentence is calibrated to sound mild while smuggling in a more unsettling idea about human appetite for transgression.
Yehoshua, writing out of Israeli life and its relentless geography of checkpoints, disputed borders, and contested belonging, can’t treat boundaries as metaphor only. His novels return to the friction between private longing and public lines on maps: the way identity becomes paperwork, the way intimacy becomes jurisdiction. Against that backdrop, travel reads less like curiosity and more like a bid to escape the narratives assigned by birthplace and tribe. Crossing, here, is about loosening the grip of inheritance.
The subtext is also a rebuke to the modern moral story we tell about travel as automatically broadening. Yehoshua suggests that what we celebrate as openness may be driven by a darker, more ambiguous motor: the thrill of permission, the flirtation with danger, the desire to step outside the rules without fully burning them down. The boundary remains central, because without it there’s no crossing, no transformation, no story.
Yehoshua, writing out of Israeli life and its relentless geography of checkpoints, disputed borders, and contested belonging, can’t treat boundaries as metaphor only. His novels return to the friction between private longing and public lines on maps: the way identity becomes paperwork, the way intimacy becomes jurisdiction. Against that backdrop, travel reads less like curiosity and more like a bid to escape the narratives assigned by birthplace and tribe. Crossing, here, is about loosening the grip of inheritance.
The subtext is also a rebuke to the modern moral story we tell about travel as automatically broadening. Yehoshua suggests that what we celebrate as openness may be driven by a darker, more ambiguous motor: the thrill of permission, the flirtation with danger, the desire to step outside the rules without fully burning them down. The boundary remains central, because without it there’s no crossing, no transformation, no story.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wanderlust |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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