From Wanderlust

I am so old, I still remember when people read books that reported on travels to foreign lands.

With what wanderlust I read Hermann Hesse’s Out of India, decades after the once-customary going-through-puberty-with-Hesse phase, and that too is now years ago. Yes, I become quite wistful when I merely read, no, hear the first sentence of the first text: „For two hours the ship has been plagued by mosquitoes; it is very warm, and the cheerful mood from the Mediterranean has been lost astonishingly quickly.“ (see gutenberg.org)

I miss it, the time when we longed for distant places.

I miss the wanderlust.

Am I suffering from wanderlust-lust?

Oh, I still remember when I once landed in Lisbon last decade, went shopping there – and was bitterly disappointed to find branches of the same international consumer chains as back home in Cologne’s Schildergasse.

The distant is no longer truly distant today. Most once-magical places can be reached by affordable flights – only to then stand in line with a thousand other budget flyers for the selfie.

We no longer read books. Or at least not just because they report from afar. At most we look at the flight vacation pictures on Instagram, snapped by people who patiently stood in line for precisely those. Wanderlust has been replaced by envy – namely envy of the pictures.

We are searching today for a new longing.

We tried future-lust, but as is well known, the future is also no longer as appealing as it used to be. Nostalgia too would be more appealing if the suspicion weren’t growing that at least our collective memories are sloppily invented constructs.

Everything feels like some kind of longing, but which longing is it exactly? Meaning-lust? Yes, perhaps meaning-lust. Longing for something that deserves my longing.

„Have a good trip, my boy! There will come a time later when you will be consumed with longing,“ so it says in the last paragraph of Out of India, and finally: „Then come to me, and then we will agree on all sorts of things that we still think differently about today!“