11 June--How to Travel: a Theoretical Linguistic Thesis

This “traveling”—another word that requires careful thinking—could get difficult. Tiring. I think, before, I thought of traveling as a type of collecting, or a collection of states (i.e. states of being). It was the whole thing I wanted, not just to have seen one thing or been to place. I just wanted to exist in a different space with people who thought in different patterns from those I know everyday.
What I should do is think of traveling (voyager: je voyage, nous voyagons) as a state of being, rather than an action. A gerund, not a verb, but not the usual gerund of “I love traveling” and not “I am traveling” unless the “am” is translated in Italian as sono or in French as suis, as opposed to being included in the present tense for “travel.” What we need is a word that explains a complete immersion in “the being in the present”/ “the current”/”the now”/”the here”/"what is.” And then there would be no trouble about not being in reality, because you are just being. And then “traveling”—the trains, the walking, the going, the seeing—would become clear as something whole, not an action of transit. What happens is that people do not see this as a whole until it is all behind them in the slipstream, because then they can see and gather up both ends. But with this apparently ineffable conjugation, we might appreciate it the first and actual time as well.