Journeys of the Heart

“We laugh, we cry, we care about characters on screen—not because we mistake them for real, but because what they stir within us is real.” — Anonymous

Sir Walter Scott once journeyed to Stratford-upon-Avon. In another time, Li, a Business Studies student in Glasgow, set out with friends to glimpse the Glenfinnan Viaduct. That same year, Kioko, a widowed woman from Tokyo, boarded a flight to Canada; years before, her mother had travelled from the same city to Edinburgh.

At first glance, their stories seem unrelated—scattered across continents, shaped by different lives. Yet beneath the surface, they are bound by a quiet, shared impulse. Each was drawn by something unseen yet deeply felt, engaging in what psychologists describe as a parasocial relationship: a one-sided bond with a person, place, or story that has nonetheless left a genuine imprint on the heart.

Scott sought the home of Shakespeare, a figure who had lived in his imagination long before he stood at his door. Li and her friends travelled to a viaduct made famous not by history, but by fiction—the imagined passage of the Hogwarts Express. Kioko crossed oceans to visit the setting of Anne of Green Gables, while her mother had once made her own pilgrimage to the hometown of the Bay City Rollers.

I recognise the same impulse in myself. In the late spring of 2017, my wife and I travelled to the Lake District. There, almost without planning, we found ourselves drawn to Grasmere—the village where Wordsworth had lived, and where so much of his poetry had quietly taken root.

The morning we arrived felt strangely hushed, as though the village were holding its breath. Sunlight lay gently over the stone cottages, yet the stillness gave the place an almost ghostly air. We wandered slowly until we reached Wordsworth’s cottage.

Then, quite suddenly, the silence broke. A group of visitors appeared—forty or fifty in number: professors, teachers, poets, lovers of literature. They had come from Delhi, Kerala, Gujarat, Hyderabad. Standing there, I felt a quiet astonishment. What had drawn them so far, across distance and difference, to this small, unassuming place?

I managed to speak briefly with one man from Delhi, himself a poet. Pressed for time, he could offer only fragments, but I asked him the question that has lingered with me ever since: Why do we make these journeys? Why do we travel so far to stand where our favourite writers once stood, or to see the landscapes that shaped imagined worlds?

I asked it as “we,” because I am no observer standing apart. I, too, am caught in this gentle, persistent pull.

Yet even as we spoke, the answer seemed to slip just beyond reach. We circled it, touched its edges, but never quite entered its centre. And so I left with the same quiet sense I had carried in: that something important remained unspoken—something still waiting to be understood