The Toast’s literary pilgrimages archive can be found here.

When you live across the ocean from where your favourite stories are set, Europe can seem nearly as imaginary as Middle Earth. London and Paris are real, but in my mind they exist as an amalgam of stories. Pure text doesn’t provide the sensory cues of visual media, so it demands that readers participate in creating the world of the story. It’s an intimate act of collaboration, a subjective and often meaningful experience, reading a book and imagining its setting.

For bookworms, the only way to bring our experiences with a text into the real world is through a literary pilgrimage. The actual location may never replace the image in a reader’s mind, but the experience in a real space can lend concreteness to the text. After we mentally inhabit a story, does visiting a tangible space feel more real than the story, the inner lives of the characters? Can seeing a writer’s desk give us as much insight into their mind as the words they wrote, even if they haven’t sat at that desk in a hundred years or more? If not — if the places we imagine will always be more vivid than the ones we see and later remember — why are literary pilgrimages so alluring?

Previously by Evan Fleischer: This Is and Isn’t About the DC Punk Archive

“Edinburgh is a mad god’s dream,” Hugh MacDiarmid’s eponymous poem states (MacDiarmid himself described by Burns Singer as having hair that “curled up … like the grey-brown smoke of a volcano”), a poem amongst many carved into the gray granite of Scotland’s parliament, the entrance to the building that has as its immediate backdrop Arthur’s Seat shooting up green and tall behind it, an unnecessarily giant period stamped at the end of a cobblestone cowpath of a sentence, as if the world’s last medieval monk had wanted to emphasize how thoroughly done he was with writing and illustrating manuscripts after churning out The Book Of Deer, The Book Of Durrow, The Aberdeen Bestiary, and rendering Limmy’s bus capable of flight.

I went to Edinburgh to work on a sketch comedy show with Frances Bell for The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Frances said hello and Edinburgh said hello with ocean shore glass train station roofs lapping beneath North Bridge, and the laughter of Edinburgh said hello, too, with a back-and-forth set of slowly accelerating ideas pinging back and forth between the two of us — like, What about a sheepdog herding sheep who’re frozen head to hoof in giant blocks of ice? What about a sketch where Bob Dylan’s band is actually infinitely smarter than Dylan? By miles and miles.

After college, my friends and I might as well have crawled into a cannon that shot us out at varied trajectories and scattered us across the country from Minnesota all the way to east Michigan. Admittedly, many of us didn’t make it out of the Midwest, but it isn’t called flyover country for nothing – the Midwest is a formidable stretch of countryside to traverse, especially if you don’t have a reliable car. Like many people in my age bracket, I’m broke, I place almost no value on my time and health, and I miss my friends, so the allure of the long-distance overnight coach bus as an alternative to air travel is strong. I’ve traveled the inverted parabola from Minneapolis to Madison to Chicago to Ann Arbor (and all permutations therein) on the night bus so many times that I’ve become something of an expert.

The night bus can be a beautiful thing. I’ve cried, been reborn, eaten things no one would believe, and seen things I can’t explain while trundling down I-94 at three in the morning. I’ve listened to the soundtrack to Annie Get Your Gun while watching the sun rise over the Hormel Chili silo in Beloit, a coalescence of experiences that brings about something akin to ego death. My best friend received a marriage proposal from her seatmate early one morning in Chicagoland, which may seem like an odd move on his part, but is really more or less de rigueur for the particular brand of delirium everyone sinks into over the course of the journey. That’s just the way of the night bus – bizarre experiences are birthed and nurtured under the unearthly green light of discount travel, and then, like a tropical houseplant suddenly exposed to a Midwestern winter, these experiences wither away and fade to wisps as daylight arrives.

EmpathyAbroad

Are you a tourist with a heart of gold? Do you long to see a new country while simultaneously saving a handful of its local residents on your week long vacation? Then this Sean Penn-endorsed app is for you, you business-class hero.