that urge to be somewhere else

Yet another book I've had for a long while... I know I started it way back when, but now I'm beginning it again, and I had forgotten the fabulous first paragraph. It's the kind of paragraph that may not ring a bell with everyone, but if it does with you, you'll know it. Here is a short excerpt from Travels with Charley, in Search of America by John Steinbeck.

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

Steinbeck's short introductory chapter contains two more paragraphs, and it's the second paragraph's first line that makes me smile even more.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.

Don't worry, Mom, I just like a good book. ;)