As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts.

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game — none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few — drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds — promising untold opportunities — beckon.

Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band's, or even your species' might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.
Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…"

I have come to believe that mankind eternally hovers on the brinks of secret oceans of which it knows nothing.

Beyond the realms of what we see, into the regions or the unexplored limited only by our imaginations.

The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

I travelled among unknown men
in lands beyond the sea . . .

To unpathed waters, undreamed shores.

Our ways go wide and I know not whither, But my song will search through the worlds for you, Till the Seven Seas waste and the Seven Stars wither, And the dream of the heart comes true. I am out to the roads and the long, long questing, On dark tides driven, on great winds blown: I pass the runs of the world, unresting, I sail to the unknown.

The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.

The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.