No Escape, Part Thirteen: "Switch Love, Move House -- You Will Soon Be Back Where You Started"

I am intimately familiar with both the dream of Escape and its companion, the Siren song of the Ideal Place.  A long-time reader of this blog recently commented that he had spent his holiday in the Lincolnshire Wolds. Being unfamiliar with the area, I did some Internet research.  Upon seeing how lovely the area is, I soon began dreaming of spending my remaining years in a secluded vale amid the Wolds, "and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made."  With occasional treks eastward to the North Sea for a walk along the shingle.  And so it goes . . .

Harry Epworth Allen (1894-1958), "Summer" (1940)

The theme of this "No Escape" series of posts is:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  As I have noted before, this notion is not a contemporary pop psychology platitude.

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

Two centuries or so later Samuel Johnson retraced Montaigne's steps:

"The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. . . . [H]e, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove."

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).

Yes, yes, well said, sirs.  But easier said than done.

Harry Epworth Allen, "The Caravan"

                         Ideal Home

                                   1

Never would there be lives enough for all
The comely places --
Glimpsed from a car, a train, or loitered past --
That lift their faces
To be admired, murmuring 'Live with me.'

House with a well,
Or a ghost; by a stream; on a hill; in a hollow: breathing
Woodsmoke appeal,
Fresh paint, or simply a prayer to be kept warm,
Each casts her spell.

Life, claims each, will look different from my windows,
Your furniture be
Transformed in these rooms, your chaos sorted out here.
Ask for the key.
Walk in, and take me.  Then you shall live again.

                                   2

. . . Nor lives enough
For all the fair ones, dark ones, chestnut-haired ones
Promising love --
I'll be your roof, your hearth, your paradise orchard
And treasure-trove.
With puritan scents -- rosemary, thyme, verbena,
With midnight musk,
Or the plaintive, memoried sweetness tobacco-plants
Exhale at dusk,
They lure the footloose traveller to dream of
One fixed demesne,
The stay-at-home to look for his true self elsewhere.
I will remain
Your real, your ideal property.  Possess me.
Be born again.

                                   3

If only there could be lives enough, you're wishing? . . .
For one or two
Of all the possible loves a dozen lifetimes
Would hardly do:
Oak learns to be oak through a rooted discipline.

Such desirableness
Of place or person is chiefly a glamour cast by
Your unsuccess
In growing your self.  Rebirth needs more than a change of
Flesh or address.

Switch love, move house -- you will soon be back where you started,
On the same ground,
With a replica of the old romantic phantom
That will confound
Your need for roots with a craving to be unrooted.

C. Day Lewis, The Gate and Other Poems (1962).

Harry Epworth Allen, "A Derbyshire Farmstead"

Arrivals And Departures

Well, yes, "life is a journey, not a destination."  The statement is often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it is not clear that he is actually the source.  I suspect Chinese philosophers were saying something along these lines a few millennia before we in the West got around to saying it.

By now, of course, this old saw seems hopelessly devalued.  But let's face it: old saws are often true.  Moreover, the notion is not simply the stock-in-trade of self-help gurus.  For instance, C. P. Cavafy's wonderful poem "Ithaka" is a variation on the theme, and Cavafy was as unillusioned as they come (in his own dreamy way).  Here are the closing stanzas:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you're destined for.
But don't hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you're old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you've gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press 1975).

Charles Oppenheimer (1875-1961), "Kirkcudbright: Evening" (1914)

   Getting Where?

What so pure
as arrivals,
each a promise
of new beginnings?

We step into a place
we've never seen
or a place
where once we suffered.

And silly hope greets us, She says
What a beautiful Spring day
and smiles charmingly
among the falling leaves.

Ewen McCaig (editor), The Poems of Norman MacCaig (Polygon 2009).

This poem explores the "wherever you go, there you are" conundrum that I have considered in my "No Escape" series.  Dream destinations are not always what they're cracked up to be, are they?  The final stanza is lovely.

Charles Oppenheimer, "The Old Tolbooth, Kirkcudbright" (1931)

Here is R. S. Thomas in his 79th year:

               Journeys

The deception of platforms
where the arrivals and the departures
coincide.  And the smiles
on the faces of those welcoming

and bidding farewell are
to conceal the knowledge
that destinations are the familiarities
from which the traveller must set out.

R. S. Thomas, Mass for Hard Times (Bloodaxe Books 1992).

The poem is a bit reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's oft-quoted lines:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," Four Quartets (1943).

Charles Oppenheimer, "Kirkcudbright under Snow" (c. 1934)

Finally, as is usually the case, Philip Larkin shakes us by the shoulders and says:  "Snap out of it!"

       Autobiography at an Air-Station

Delay, well, travellers must expect
Delay.  For how long?  No one seems to know.
With all the luggage weighed, the tickets checked,
It can't be long . . . We amble to and fro,
Sit in steel chairs, buy cigarettes and sweets
And tea, unfold the papers.  Ought we to smile,
Perhaps make friends?  No: in the race for seats
You're best alone.  Friendship is not worth while.

Six hours pass: if I'd gone by boat last night
I'd be there now.  Well, it's too late for that.
The kiosk girl is yawning.  I feel staled,
Stupefied, by inaction -- and, as light
Begins to ebb outside, by fear; I set
So much on this Assumption.  Now it's failed.

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1988).  Larkin wrote the poem in December of 1953, at the ripe old age of 31 (with fear already setting in).

As long-time (and much appreciated) readers of this blog may recall, Larkin can do little wrong in my book.  Thus, I confess that I am fond of this poem, however dreary (or horrific?) it may seem to some.  Here's a thought:  Larkin has condensed Dante's Inferno into a sonnet.  "Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a dark wood . . ."

Charles Oppenheimer, "From a Tower, Kirkcudbright"

No Escape, Part Twelve: "Every Hearth Has A Ghost, Alack"

The theme of this ongoing series is our penchant for imagining that, despite evidence to the contrary (i.e., ourselves), there is an Ideal Place where Happiness awaits us.  I hasten to add that I am not standing in judgment of this penchant, nor am I claiming immunity from it.  I am a daydreamer and an escape artist of long standing.  Hence, for example, my fondness for paintings depicting bucolic landscapes and charming villages of vanished times.

                                      H. S. Merritt, "Bowerchalke" (c. 1942)

               Starlings on the Roof

'No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the spot,
And others are coming who knew them not.

'If you listen anon, with an ear intent,
The voices, you'll find, will be different
From the well-known ones of those who went.'

'Why did they go?  Their tones so bland
Were quite familiar to our band;
The comers we shall not understand.'

'They look for a new life, rich and strange;
They do not know that, let them range
Wherever they may, they will get no change.

'They will drag their house-gear ever so far
In their search for a home no miseries mar;
They will find that as they were they are,

'That every hearth has a ghost, alack,
And can be but the scene of a bivouac
Till they move their last -- no care to pack!'

Thomas Hardy, Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914).

                                    H. S. Merritt, "Sennen Cove" (c. 1940)

"They will find that as they were they are" is Hardy's version of "wherever you go, there you are."  Of course, Hardy being Hardy, the denouement in the final line is not unexpected.

If one reads Hardy's poetry for long enough a time, one becomes accustomed to encountering birds who comment upon the humans who inhabit their world.  It now seems perfectly natural to me.  I've grown quite fond of these talking birds.  They are uncommonly wise and have a pleasing sense of humor.  We are well advised to pay attention to what they say.

                          H. S. Merritt, "Bridge in the Avon Valley" (c. 1942)

No Escape, Part Eleven: "Back"

The theme of this "No Escape" series is:  "Wherever you go, there you are." This remark sounds like a bit of contemporary pop psychology.  However, it may have its origins in a remark by Socrates.  This surmise is not based upon systematic research, but upon a passage from Montaigne (which I have previously posted):

"Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country. . .  Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  'I should think not,' he said, 'he took himself along with him.'"

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," The Complete Essays of Montaigne (translated by Donald Frame) (Stanford University Press 1958).

             Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (c. 1947)

Yes, all roads do lead back to ourselves.  That being said, I know quite well the siren song of escape.  It goes something like this:  "I should not be withheld but that some day/Into their vastness I should steal away . . ." (Robert Frost, from "Into My Own.")

                  Back

Where is that sought-for place
Which grants a brief release
From locked impossibilities?
Impossible to say,
No signposts point the way.

Its very terrain vague
(What mountainside?  What lake?)
It gives the senses nothing,
Nothing to carry back,
No souvenir, no photograph.

Towards its borders no train shrieks
(What meadowland?  What creeks?)
And no plane howls towards its heart.
It is yourself you hear
(What parks?  What gentle deer?).

Only desperation finds it,
Too desperate to blaze a trail.
It only lives by knowing lack.
The single sign that you were there is,
You know that you are back.

D. J. Enright, Unlawful Assembly (1968).

                                              Cedric Lockwood Morris
                     "From a Window at 45 Brook Street, London" (1926)

A Proper Place, Part One: "I Like It As It Is"

In a series of posts titled "No Escape" I have looked at the well-known phenomenon of "wherever you go, there you are."  To wit:  we imagine that everything in our life will fall magically into place if we can simply find the Ideal Place that, until now, has eluded us.  It comes as no surprise that this is a delusion, a delusion that has been remarked upon by Montaigne, Johnson, and a host of others.

However, although the Ideal Place may be a chimera, a case may be made that a Proper Place can be found.  I realize that this may seem like a distinction without a difference.  But I see the distinction (somewhat fuzzily) as this:  finding one's Proper Place does not guarantee "happiness" (whatever that is) or provide Big Answers (to allude to Elizabeth Jennings's poem "Answers"); however, a Proper Place may provide equanimity and content ("content" as in A. E. Housman's "that is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain").

The following poem by Neil Powell provides an example of what I am (inadequately) trying to articulate.

                             Charles Ginner, "Flask Walk, Skyline" (1934)

                           Covehithe

In my dream they said:  "You must go to Covehithe."
I crossed over the causeway between two blue lakes
And I found myself on a long forest path
With a few wooden shacks and a glimpse of the sea.
I thought after all it was a place that might suit me.
But they said:  "You must learn from your mistakes."

So, I have come to Covehithe.  Low winter sun
Scans fields of pigs, dead skeletal trees,
Collapsing cliffs.  There are ships on the horizon.
The great church, wrecked by civil war, not storm,
Now shields a smaller church from further harm.
And they were wrong:  I like it as it is.

Neil Powell, The Times Literary Supplement, February 7, 2003.

             Charles Ginner, "Lancaster from Castle Hill Terrace" (c. 1947)

No Escape, Part Ten: "Angle Of Vision"

In previous installments of "No Escape," we have seen some opine that, rather than pursuing the longed-for (but ever-elusive) Ideal Place, we should simply look around us.  The following poem does not necessarily say that where we are is, in fact, the Ideal Place, but it does suggest that Right Here is not without interest.

                       Angle of Vision

But, John, have you seen the world, said he,
Trains and tramcars and sixty-seaters,
Cities in lands across the sea --
Giotto's tower and the dome of St. Peter's?

No, but I've seen the arc of the earth,
From the Birsay shore, like the edge of a planet,
And the lifeboat plunge through the Pentland Firth
To a cosmic tide with the men that man it.

Robert Rendall, Shore Poems (1957).

Robert Rendall (1898-1967) lived most of his life in Kirkwall, Orkney.  He was in the drapery business, but he also wrote poetry and painted.  He was a conchologist whose Mollusca Orcadensia was published in 1956.  I found "Angle of Vision" in  The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse -- yet another discovery by the ever-diligent, ever-reliable Philip Larkin.

                                      The Broch of Gurness, Orkney

A "broch" is a stone tower that served as a dwelling.  Rendall discovered the Broch of Gurness in 1929 while he was out sketching.  At that time, the area was simply a large earth mound.  One of the legs of the stool on which Rendall was sitting sank into the ground.  He turned over a few stones and came upon a staircase which led down into the mound.  Excavations were undertaken and the broch was discovered.

No Escape, Part Nine: "Not Much Here But Grass And Daisies And A Gulley That Lazes Its Way To The Weir"

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987) lived in Millom, Cumbria, his entire life.  That fact may perhaps make him either uniquely qualified or uniquely unqualified to opine on the likelihood of happening upon the Ideal Place that calls to us from beyond the horizon.  I opt for the former.

     The Man from the Advertising Department

There's more to see
In the next field.
Not much here
But grass and daisies
And a gulley that lazes
Its way to the weir --
Oh there's much more to see
In the next field.

There are better folk
In the next street.
Nobody here
But much-of-a-muchness people:
The butcher, the blacksmith,
The auctioneer,
The man who mends the weathercock
When the lightning strikes the steeple --
But they're altogether a better class
In the next street.

There'll be more to do
In the next world.
Nothing here
But breathing fresh air,
Loving, shoving, moving around a bit,
Counting birthdays, forgetting them, giving
Your own little push to the spin of the earth;
It all amounts to
No more than living --
But by all accounts
There'll be more to do
And more to see
And VIP neighbours
In the next world.

Norman Nicholson, Collected Poems (Faber and Faber 1994).

             Allan Gwynne Jones, "Spring Evening, Froxfield" (1922)

How To Live, Part Six: "Not Conscious That You Have Been Seeking Suddenly You Come Upon It"

My series of "No Escape" posts suggests that the Wherever You Go, There You Are rule quashes any hope we may have of finding the Ideal Place.  R. S. Thomas -- like others -- suspects that what we seek may be right there in front of us, and that the only way to discover it is by giving up the search.

                       Arrival

Not conscious
       that you have been seeking
             suddenly
       you come upon it

the village in the Welsh hills
             dust free
       with no road out
but the one you came in by.

             A bird chimes
        from a green tree
the hour that is no hour
        you know.  The river dawdles
to hold a mirror for you
where you may see yourself
        as you are, a traveller
             with the moon's halo
        above him, who has arrived
        after long journeying where he
             began, catching this
        one truth by surprise
that there is everything to look forward to.

R. S. Thomas, Later Poems (1983).

Thomas's poem is reminiscent of these lines towards the end of T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" (in Four Quartets):

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

                                     Paul Nash, "Wittenham" (1935)

No Escape, Part Eight: "No Traveller Tells Of It, However Far He Has Been"

The search for the Ideal Place is, at bottom, a search for Home (whatever that is).  Being of a melancholy turn of mind, Edward Thomas was wont to express a longing for a missing "home" or "land" that seemed always out of reach.  But, because he was a wise and a sensitive man, Thomas knew that he was kidding himself.  The Ideal Place -- the Home we long for -- is a chimera.  And the old saw (traceable to Socrates via Montaigne) beckons:  "wherever you go, there you are."

                         Home

Not the end: but there's nothing more.
Sweet Summer and Winter rude
I have loved, and friendship and love,
The crowd and solitude:

But I know them: I weary not;
But all that they mean I know.
I would go back again home
Now.  Yet how should I go?

This is my grief.  That land,
My home, I have never seen;
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.

And could I discover it,
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
Here, to these things that were.

Remembering ills, though slight
Yet irremediable,
Brings a worse, an impurer pang
Than remembering what was well.

No: I cannot go back,
And would not if I could.
Until blindness come, I must wait
And blink at what is not good.

                                 Richard Eurich, "Seabound" (1984)

No Escape, Part Seven: "The Bliss Which Dreams And Blackbirds' Voices Promise, Of Which The Waves Whisper"

I wish to thank the erudite and generous Michael Gilleland of Laudator Temporis Acti (which I highly recommend) for introducing me to Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946).  Smith -- in his wry, tongue-in-cheek fashion -- recognized our (and his own) tendency to pine for an ideal land that harbors our long-sought happiness.

                                                  Where?

I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?

Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens pictured by Chinese poets beyond the great, cold palaces of the Moon?

               Poussin, "Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice" (1650)

                                                  Happiness

Cricketers on village greens, hay-makers in the evening sunshine, small boats that sail before the wind -- all these create in me the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have fancied) in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered valley.  Certain grassy lanes seem to lead through the copses thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.

               Poussin, "Landscape with Saint John on Patmos" (1640)

                                                  Somewhere

Somewhere, far below the horizon, there is a City; some day I shall sail to find its harbour; by what star I shall steer, or where the seaport lies, I do not know; but somehow or other through calms and storms and the sea-noises I shall voyage, until at last some mountain peak shall rise, telling me I am near my destination; or I shall see, at dusk, a lighthouse, twinkling at its port.

                           Poussin, "Landscape with Diogenes" (1647)

These short "pieces of moral prose" (as Smith described them) come from Smith's Trivia (1917) and More Trivia (1921).  Again, I thank Michael Gilleland for introducing me to Smith and his work.

No Escape, Part Six: "The Bright Field" And "The Water's Quiet Insistence"

In this visit to the land of "wherever you go, there you are," R. S. Thomas offers a possible solution to the problem of not being able to escape from yourself when you attempt to travel to that ever-illusory ideal place.  It turns out that the place you long for may be right there in front of you (if you first turn aside a bit).

            The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it.  I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.  Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past.  It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

                    John Nash, "A Gloucestershire Landscape" (1914)

            Llananno

I often call there.
There are no poems in it
for me.  But as a gesture
of independence of the speeding
traffic I am a part
of, I stop the car,
turn down the narrow path
to the river, and enter
the church with its clear reflection
beside it.
                 There are few services
now; the screen has nothing
to hide.  Face to face
with no intermediary
between me and God, and only the water's
quiet insistence on a time
older than man, I keep my eyes
open and am not dazzled,
so delicately does the light enter
my soul from the serene presence
that waits for me till I come next.

                      John Nash, "Landscape Near Hadleigh" (c. 1945)

No Escape, Part Five: "Some Unhaunted Desert"

For this visit to the realm of the ideal place, a place that always comes up against the "wherever you go, there you are" problem, I wish to consider a poem written by Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (1565-1601).  Caught up in the wars and court intrigues of Elizabethan times, Devereux had ample reason to long for a simpler, less dangerous life and land.

Happy were he could finish forth his fate
   In some unhaunted desert, most obscure
From all societies, from love and hate
   Of worldly folk; then might he sleep secure;
Then wake again, and give God ever praise,
   Content with hips and haws and bramble-berry;
In contemplation spending all his days,
   And change of holy thoughts to make him merry;
Where, when he dies, his tomb may be a bush,
Where harmless robin dwells with gentle thrush.

"Some unhaunted desert":  that phrase alone is worth a lifetime of writing, as far as I am concerned.  (But perhaps I am easily pleased -- "or else I'm getting soft," to quote Bob Dylan.)

Alas, Devereux's wish was not to be fulfilled:  he was beheaded on February 25, 1601, for his alleged involvement in a plot against Elizabeth.  His fate certainly adds poignancy to the poem, especially to: "then might he sleep secure."

No Escape, Part Four: A. S. J. Tessimond

We have previously heard from Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Cavafy on the "wherever you go, there you are" problem.  A. S.  J. Tessimond (1902-1962) (who I intend to write about as a neglected poet) has spoken on this subject as well.  That Tessimond at times worked in the advertising business (and wrote at least three poems on the business -- "Advertising," "The Ad-Man," and "Defence of the Ad-Man") may (or may not) be something to bear in mind as you think about the poem. 

                  Where?

You are in love with a country
Where people laugh in the sun
And the people are warm as the sunshine and live and move easily
And women with honey-coloured skins and men with no frowns on
     their faces
Sit on white terraces drinking red wine
While the sea spreads peacock feathers on cinnamon sands
And palms weave sunlight into sheaves of gold
And at night the shadows are indigo velvet
And there is dancing to soft, soft, soft guitars
Played by copper fingers under a froth of stars.

Perhaps your country is where you think you will find it.
Or perhaps it has not yet come or perhaps it has gone.
Perhaps it is east of the sun and west of the moon.
Perhaps it is a country called the Hesperides
And Avalon and Atlantis and Eldorado:
A country which Gaugin looked for in Tahiti and Lawrence in Mexico,
And whether they found it only they can say, and they not now.
Perhaps you will find it where you alone can see it,
But if you see it, though no one else can, it will be there,
It will be yours.

                 Caspar David Friedrich, "The Life Stages" (1835)

No Escape, Part Three: C. P. Cavafy

No visit to the land of "wherever you go, there you are" would be complete without considering one of C. P. Cavafy's best-known poems:

                       The City

You said:  "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."

You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city.  Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

C. P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) (Princeton University Press, 1992).

You have to give Cavafy credit:  he doesn't mince words, does he? 

On the other hand, one could look at another of his poems - "Ithaka" - and find, if not a way of escape from "the black ruins of [your] life," at least a potential way of living that saves you from false hopes.  But I'll save "Ithaka" for another time.

                                     Cavafy's City: Alexandria

No Escape, Part Two: Samuel Johnson

When it comes to obtaining wise, no-nonsense, eloquent, and entertaining counsel on Life and/or How to Live, I am more than willing to rely solely upon Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.  As far as the quiddities of human nature and human behavior are concerned, one can be fairly certain that the two of them have been there before we have.

Hence, we should not be astonished that Samuel Johnson has visited the "wherever you go, there you are" territory and has reached the same conclusions as Montaigne (but in his own delightful fashion, of course):

     The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointments and complaints. 

     [Johnson then describes Abraham Cowley's plan - as expressed by Cowley in the preface to his poems - to abandon England for America in order to gain peace of mind.]  Surely no stronger instance can be given of a persuasion that content was the inhabitant of particular regions, and that a man might set sail with a fair wind, and leave behind him all his cares, incumbrances, and calamities. . . .

     [Cowley] never suspected that the cause of his unhappiness was within, that his own passions were not sufficiently regulated, and that he was harrassed by his own impatience, which could never be without something to awaken it, would accompany him over the sea, and find its way to his American elysium.  He would, upon the trial, have been soon convinced, that the fountain of content must spring up in the mind; and that he, who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing, but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, Number 6 (April 7, 1750).   
 

      Claude Lorrain, "Imaginary View of Delphi, with a Procession"

No Escape, Part One: Montaigne

An old saw:  "Wherever you go, there you are."  (Have no fear!  I am not venturing into "pop psychology," nor am I about to offer "self-help" advice.  Montaigne will arrive in a moment.)  Put differently:  There is no escaping yourself. 

Not surprisingly, Montaigne (and, it turns out, Socrates) covered this ground long before we moderns arrived on the scene:

Ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and lust do not leave us when we change our country.  "Behind the horseman sits black care."  [Horace]  They often follow us even into the cloisters and the schools of philosophy.  Neither deserts, nor rocky caves, nor hair shirts, nor fastings will free us of them. . . . Someone said to Socrates that a certain man had grown no better by his travels.  " I should think not," he said; "he took himself along with him."  

     Why should we move to find

     Countries and climates of another kind?

     What exile leaves himself behind?  [Horace] 

If a man does not first unburden his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will cause it to be crushed still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled.  You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him.  You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them.

Michel de Montaigne, "Of Solitude," from Essays (translated by Donald Frame).

On the rafters of his library, Montaigne engraved quotes of which he wished to be reminded.

The rafter below contains part of a quote from Terence: "homo sum humani a me nihil alienum puto."  Alas, I have no Latin, but here is one way of translating the line: "I am human; so nothing human is strange to me."