Exploring the Enrichments of Adventure Travel
After nearly 20 years as the CEO of a major international advertising agency, Norman Brown retired — and started an exhilarating new chapter: traveling around the world, and taking photographs and writing poems to capture those travels. Many of these appear in his new book, Untamed Places. The new issue of Geographic Expeditions’ online magazine, Recce: Literary Journeys for the Discerning Traveler, presents an intriguing in-depth conversation with this man who embodies the life-enrichments of adventure travel.
I love how Brown answered the question, “What is the value and meaning of travel for you?”
Here’s what he said:
I guess I just totally buy into that oft-repeated quote from St. Augustine: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.” And, indeed, I want to read the whole book, savoring the cities and peoples, their works, their past, as well as every last aspect of our planetary earth, all its beauty and its vast, infinite variety of forms. Some people collect art, or certain kinds of objects. I collect these experiences. Not in the sense of ticking off countries that I’ve been to. I’ve never even bothered to add them up. I simply want to know—and know well enough to feel the essence—of each different kind of place and experience. Travel, therefore, is the medium, the great host, the animating force by means of which it all happens. It is as necessary to my experiences, as movement is, to distinguish a living thing from stone.
To read all of this fascinating conversation, click here: A Conversation with Norman Brown.