The Motorcycle Diaries

Have you read The Motorcycle Diaries?

I bought it ages ago

(well, the end of November)

Because my sister and cousin and I 

made big plans to motorcycle 

across South America 

in approximately the year 2017.

But I just started reading it yesterday 

- the timing was perfect - 

and I absolutely love it.  

Confession: I cried while reading the introduction.

Let me give you a few of these beautiful phrases that made me smile so hard my stomach burst:

"...he filled his whole life with youthfulness and matured his youth without diluting it"

"...with the sole purpose of getting to know the world..."

"our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner..."

"having the spirit of a dreamer.."

"never to give up until we had realized our dream"

"the enormity of our endeavor escaped us in those moments; all we could see was the dust on the road ahead and ourselves on the bike, devouring kilometers.."

"i felt myself lifted definitvely away on the winds of adventure towards worlds i envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations i imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be"

"an expedition has two points, the point of departure and the point of arrival. if your intention is to make the second theoretical point coincide with the actual point of arrival, don't think about the means - because the journey is a virtual space that finishes when it finishes, and there are as manymeans ars there are different ways of "finishing." that is to say, the means are endless."

"...when in reality we had only just begun..."

And a picture of some of Che's observations of life, of injustice, that pricked my heart, pinched my mind:

"...we will see whether some day, some miner will take up his pick in pleasure and go to poison his lungs with a conscious joy."

"...the need to build schools that would orient individuals within their own world, enable them to play a useful role within it..."

"the need to change fundamentally the present system of education, which, on the rare occasion it does offer Indians education (according only to white man's criteria) simply fills them with shame and resentment, rendering them unable to help their fellow Indians and at the severe disadvantage of having to fight within a hostile white society which refuses to accept them..."

"The semi-indigenous features of the curator, his eyes shining with enthusiasm and his faith in the future, constituted one more treasure of the museum, but a living museum, proof of a race still fighting for its identity."

Oh. Oh. Oh.