A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

George Moore, Impressions and Opinions, 1891

For most of my life I owned very little. I dropped out of college and for almost a decade wandered remote parts of Asia in cheap sneakers and worn jeans, with lots of time and no money. The cities I knew best were steeped in medieval richness; the lands I passed through were governed by ancient agricultural traditions. When I reached for a physical object, it was almost surely made of wood, fiber, or stone. I ate with my hands, trekked on foot through mountain valleys, and slept wherever. I carried very little stuff. My personal possessions totaled a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, a penknife, and some cameras. Living close to the land, I experienced the immediacy that opens up when the buffer of technology is removed. I got colder often, hotter more frequently, soaking wet a lot, bitten by insects faster, and synchronized quicker to the rhythm of the day and seasons. Time seemed abundant. After eight years in Asia, I returned to the United States. I sold what little I had and bought an inexpensive bicycle, which I rode on a 5,000-mile meander across the American continent, west to east.

Kelly, K. (2010) What technology wants. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

Could we have trout? No. Chicken? No. Beefsteak ? No. What could we have ? Veal and eggs. The strangers from Gastein had eaten up everything else which the Bockstein inn possessed. Veal and eggs are the two staple delights of the German stomach; the veal steaming with fat and mustard, and the eggs horrible with butter and garlic. Ugh 1 All my life I shall remember the egg-salad which dear Marie added to our dinner yesterday, and of which I tasted, to appear civil, but was positively obliged to swallow hastily, like calomel, by help of great mouthfuls of beer. I thought I had tasted of bad things in Italy, but I give Germany the unquestioned palm.

Hunt Jackson, Helen. Bits of travel. Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1874.

Ciascuno ha le sue spiegazioni per la malattia insana dell'andar su ruote, perché infinite sono le esperienze alternative che la bici riesce a sintetizzare. C'é il viaggio come leggerezza, come nomadismo esistenziale ed eliminazione del superfluo, raccontato per esempio da Marco Aime nell'attraversamento del Sahel. Ci sono la lentezza e la memoria, descritte da Giulio Mozzi, scrittore padovano che ha percorso l'Italia a piedi. Ci sono la fuga e la solitudine negli elementi, come ha saputo dire quel lupo solitario che è lo skipper Paolo Rizzi dopo un naufragio in mezzo all'Atlantico. O il viaggio come introspezione, il pellegrinaggio talvolta penitenziale di Werner Herzog e Peter Handke.