text: Travel, Travail, Temptation - Spinozablue
  . . . . Through beautiful meadows and across ancient hills, to her destiny, but her destiny was not too far from the place she was born. Hardy creates a big world for her, with extensive inner horizons, but she walked almost everywhere she went, rarely was granted even so much as a ride on a horse or in a carriage. Her world must have been quite large for her. To us, in the 21st century, with our cars and trains and planes? Many of us travel farther each day just going to work. But do we have a larger world than Tess, or Huck, or the characters in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County?
  D. H. Lawrence averred:
  What can travel do for us? Do we have excuses in our age to avoid it? Is there more to be learned from staying at home, making the rounds of the neighborhood, the locality, the township?
  Gregor Mendel became the father of genetics by studying pea plants. The study of fruit flies may lead someday to a cure for autism. Madame Curie discovered a world inside her tiny lab . . . and Proust found deathless poetry in a madeleine.
  But how far did they travel before they found such life in minutiae? Literally, metaphorically? Do we need to go far to see the near, or look closely at small things to see the bigger picture?