Road to Nowhere

So I've been doing some travelling, not far, but I've been on the move nonetheless. The theme of wandering and traveling in literature and poetry of the 20th century is a common one. I feel a connection with that tradition and want to add my own thoughts on it.

It seems to me that we pass through this life like a ghost. Fleeting whisps of smoke or cloud, tearing down the freeway, billowing throught the highest limbs of a tree on top of a mountain, rolling along a forest path, filling a small cabin with its dense smell. Smoke and cloud have no particular direction, they just move, blown by the wind. I've read a lot of travelling accounts and it has always frustrated me how the writer is able to capture the raw viseral experience of life. To describe a slice of pie, a sunny hill or a pint of beer as the most spectacular experience possible. I crave the potent experience of life that good novelists are able to capture. No matter where I ramble, or how long I keep moving I cannot find the potent reality of a novel.

Why is the "imaginary" reality of a novel so much more real for me? Why do I feel as if this life is a hangover? Why can't I ever feel truly connected with the physical reality around me? Why do I drift about like a ghost? Perhaps...

Have you ever noticed how the myst parts as a person walks through it? Have you also noticed how a ghost appears to "pass through" a wall or other object? These two questions are related to one another. If we assume that the myst possesses less substance than a human because we perceive our bodies passing through it, why do we not carry this logic to a ghost walking through a wall? Would a ghost, being unaffected by the physical world, not be more real than the physical world?

If I am a ghost, am I not then more real than the world around me? Is this world not a reality of myst? Have I only to realize this truth to be entirely free from its limited grasp? Hangovers are truly a gift. For when we drink we die to our physical world and drift into the land of our dreams. When we wake up, we do not wake up into the reality we were in before we were drunk. We feel as if we are foreigners in "our own bodies". When you sit in the state of being hungover you experience the physical world for the illusion that it is. Even more so, when you wander around in that state you feel even more like a ghost, but it makes more sense. You understand the fact that you are just a ghost. You feel free as you drift like a passing shadow rambling down a road to nowhere- a road to everywhere...