Trvaeling Is Not Enough Poem by gershon hepner

Traveling is not enough,
discovery must be the goal.
Observations off the cuff
are pleasant for the soul,
but don’t transform the steps we take,
for we won’t reach a peak
unless we travel for the sake
of finding what we seek,
nor will we find a paradise
beyond the one that we
have lost if we familiar eyes
we always choose to see.

Steve Jones, professor genetics at University College, London, writes in the WSJ about Darwin’s joyful journey of discovery in the “Beagle” (“Darwin’s Joyful Journey of Discovery”, May 31,2008) :

Next year is Darwin year: the bicentennial of the great man's birth and the 150th anniversary of “The Origin of Species.” The book is not the easiest of reads, but it is less of a trudge than Charles Darwin's four volumes on barnacles or his 15 works on topics as distinct as climbing plants and the formation of mold by earthworms. They tell, in plain and sometimes pedestrian prose, the tale of a life of observation and experiment that founded modern biology. 'The Voyage of the Beagle, ' in contrast, sings. Its language is that of a young man intoxicated by the tropics ('To a person fond of natural history, such a day as this brings with it a deeper pleasure than he can ever hope to experience again') and careless of the risks ('Upon landing I found that I was to a certain degree a prisoner... a traveller has no protection beside his fire-arms') . The youthful Darwin was a master of unadorned English. He took with him more than geology textbooks: “Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.” The joy of the journey was that it had a point. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have each written great travel books about South America - but why, in the end, did they bother? The smell of the agent, the contract and the advance hangs around their pages, but for Darwin (who was in no need of money) every paragraph exudes instead the heady scent of discovery. For a real adventurer, to travel hopefully is not enough: Some end must be in view. As he says in the last pages of his account of the Beagle voyage: “If a person asked my advice before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced.”

6/2/08