Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination

“Travel is useful, it exercises the imagination” is the governing paradox of the preface to Journey to the End of the Night: travel’s imaginative promise is set against the disappointment and fatigue of everything else. The passage then turns that contrast into a poetics of fiction, defining the novel as an inward journey that crosses life toward death.

Travel and Imagination

The statement begins with a practical-sounding endorsement of travel: it is useful because it exercises the imagination. But the praise is immediately qualified. Beyond that exercise, the passage finds only disappointment and fatigue. Travel’s value therefore rests less on destinations or physical experience than on the imaginative faculty it activates.

The next claim makes that principle explicit: the journey is entirely imaginary, and that is precisely its strength. The apparent limitation becomes a source of power. Rather than promising literal escape or discovery, the passage locates travel’s force in the mind’s ability to make a journey without leaving ordinary life behind.

The Novel as a Journey

The passage identifies this imagined journey with the novel, calling it a fictitious narrative and describing its route as one that goes from life to death. People, animals, cities, and things are all included within this imaginative passage; the journey encompasses both living beings and the world they inhabit. The movement toward death gives the conceit its stark direction, while the insistence on fiction makes clear that the route is created through narrative rather than traversed as a literal itinerary.

The appeal to Littré, who is said never to be wrong, supplies a mock-authoritative confirmation that the work is a novel and a fictitious narrative. The claim’s comic certainty reinforces the passage’s self-consciousness: it knows that it is describing fiction, and makes that status part of its account of what fiction can do.

Closing the Eyes

The imaginative journey is presented as available to anyone. The passage reduces its method to a simple gesture: close one’s eyes. This turns inward attention into the means of travel and makes the novel’s voyage at once ordinary in its accessibility and extraordinary in its destination.

The final phrase places the journey on the other side of life. It does not explain that realm as a concrete place; instead, it leaves the novel poised at a threshold where imagination can approach what lies beyond life. The expression thus links travel, fiction, and mortality: the journey matters not because it escapes death, but because its imagined course carries life toward death and looks beyond it.