Permeated by a sense of transition, this time of year in
North America is redolent with graduations, summer plans, travel plans…travel…travel.
Amazon’s Kindle re-kindled my reading desires, and among the
works loaded onto my reader, like giraffes and zebras populating the savannah,
is the travel writing of Mary Shelley, essays and letters, some nearly 200
years old----200 years!----recounting her travels from England through Europe.
Her observations are sympathetic in a general sense, her
discourses on politics and art insightful, and her quite entertainingly bitchy
and bratty impatience and exasperation with ugliness (people and geography) and
inconvenience (transportation and lodging snafus) secure the impression that
travel two centuries ago is, in its essence, not much different from travel
today, sublime but also, as everyone who has done it right knows, hard
work. Mary Shelley’s travel writing is
an ideal companion for when the journey gets tough. Mary Shelley's Amazon page.
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