'The Soul of a Journey Is Liberty'

Zbigniew Herbert begins his 1966 essay “Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy” with these words: “When a moment comes that my body will have only enough strength to fix the pillow under the head, I will have no choice but write a large piece of work, that is a book and not a collection of drafts, which will be titled: Introduction to the theory of journey.” Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Herbert, permission to travel from Poland to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of his poem “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter): “If you set out on a journey let it be long a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch so you can confront the world with your whole skin” Like…