Muse or Mountain? Or tree or cliff or steel-girded building. Each (person) has their aesthetic and so each will find their way into that landscape which most suits their predilections. It seems so simple, you might find yourself ignoring entire facades as "just so." The reader is presented with a scene. There are the reds and the yellows. Perhaps flowers, perhaps rain. They may find themselves walking down a city street with a group of unobservant tourists piloting Segways on that same street in the opposite direction. A scene may be calmer than this, where the light is noted, the calmness of a body of water as it washes beneath equally calm winds and sky. Setting is important. It protects from a devolution towards ethereal vomit. Where are we? We don't know. It was never said. So then how did we get here?
It may be that even the slightest hint of a difference in one's environment can be a cure for isolation. Not the isolation of choice, which is a gift, but the isolation of loneliness, which corrupts things even when you're alone. That would make sense. Author's have often crafted from an isolated perspective. Even as that mob of tourists comes to bowl them over, the author may still feel completely isolated as they pick themselves up. It occurs to me that 'author' here may not necessarily be synonymous with 'writer.' It could be attributed to something as ambient as 'person.' That person is who the writer connects with. It is why their writing can be effective, as it creates a focal point for resonance between the two.
"—I understood that the startling strangeness, the special beauty of these frescoes was due to the large place which the symbol occupied in them, and the fact that it was represented, not as a symbol, since the thought symbolized was not expressed, but as real, as actually experienced or physically handled, gave something more concrete and more striking to the lesson it taught."
from In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
What then of travel? We'll speak here of physical travel, specifically. So much can be made of the mind. But travel to whatever place can only be seen as a wholistic good. Partly, because it is at its very base, experience, and experience at its very base is a necessary component for all writing. How that experience manifests may be unclear, but as far as I can tell it preempts all creativity in this space. You can then understand the difficulties of young writers. Experience is not the tool, but it is the way. A young writer may have a wonderful tool, they may have many; i.e. their mind, their sense, their eye. An eye for writing is often as important as the writing itself. But without experience as guide or boundary or rule, call it what you will, they might as well be writing with a pen on the grass.
It is an unending point of frustration for those (the unfinished). To simply want to try and be unable. To think you have tried and be reminded you are incomplete. You can only speak to them, as you speak to yourself, to look for all those opportunities for growth. Those moments will become where you feel most alive, most satisfied with existence. As a hint, that may mean sitting at a cafe in Paris or jumping into the ocean next to the Falaise d'Aval. It may also mean standing by a fence and making noises at grazing horses or cows in rural Colorado. Proust found some of it in the unfolding of a piece of paper in a cup of tea. Banality and the seemingly "every day" are perfect hiding places for the glimmering points of being.
"The traffic in the streets, people on the sidewalks and on steps and in windows, helicopters flying across the sky like dragonflies, children who could come running out at any moment and crawl in the mud or snow, ride tricycles, shoot down the gigantic slide in the middle of the playground, climb the bridge of the fully equipped "ship" beside it, play in the sandpit, play in the small "house," throw balls or just scamper around, screaming and shouting, filling the yard with a cacophony like a cliff of nesting birds from morning to early afternoon, only interrupted, as now, by the peace of mealtimes."
from My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard
It is true, you can write anywhere and you can write about anything. Right now someone is writing a list of the "5 Best Places To Sell Your Used Clothes" while at the same time another person is writing the next Odyssey in a room adjacent to where a third person is creating their treatise on what spices have ruined modern cooking. It's all there. What seems unavoidable, however, is how those individuals came to be there.
There is something unavoidable in a trip. It is a movement towards the opposite of nonexistence. In a sense, you are not only existing, you are performing your existence. Walking into the cathedral at Saint Sulpice, seeing the fountain and the red marble within, that is something like bearing witness to other performances. Those performative acts are associated with other people, other humans, but they don't seem exclusive to the species. So when you're walking on a black beach in Iceland and there's a hard edge where the grass meets the sand, with volcanic rock behind it that’s bursting from somewhere beneath to form snub-nosed hills of rock, you feel you are witnessing a performance.
Someone might witness this in the similar eruptions of childbirth. Some might even witness it in the filing of a paycheck or a disruption in their stock portfolio. It is what distinguishes life from the opposite. There is the idea, the object, and there is the performance. Travel could be seen as performance and observance. Either way, it's all written right there, just waiting to be spoken of.
"How far off are those years, mine and not mine,
When one wrote poems of Italy
Telling about evenings in the fields of Siena
Or about cicadas in Sicilian ruins.
Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo.
He: That I was too politicized.
And I answered him more or less as follows:
If you have a nail in your shoe, what then?
Do you love that nail? Same with me.
I am for the moon amid the vineyards
When you see high up the snow on the Alps.
I am for the cypresses at dawn
And for the bluish air in the valleys.
I could compose, right now, a song
On the taste of peaches, on September in Europe.
No one can accuse me of being without joy
Or of not noticing girls who pass by.
I do not deny not that I would like to gobble up
All existing flowers, to eat all the colors.
I have been devouring this world in vain
For forty years, a thousand would not be enough.
Yes, I would like to be a poet of the five senses,
That's why I don't allow myself to become one.
Yes, thought has less weight than the word lemon
That's why in my words I do not reach for fruit.
from ‘In Milan’ by Czeslaw Milosz