Holed up in my house for three months now, under quarantine, having missed two much anticipated long-planned trips to see places I had never been and people I see too infrequently, travel is on my mind. What is the mental function of travel, and can it be replicated in confinement?

Trying to plan and anticipate one’s entire future life is beyond human capacity, if only the greatest grandmasters can hold in their hands an approximation of all the possibilities of a meager chess game. But planning and anticipation are key to the pleasures of a vacation trip with a defined term. Choices fall into neatly defined categories: hotel, restaurant, sights, entertainment. With only a certain number of hours on a certain number of days, one can permute and select theoretically ideal options with ease.

Then the travel plan is laid out like a blueprint, and one walks into reality as if it were a construction, deriving further pleasure from measuring the gaps and tolerances, registering the surprise deviations. Afterwards, the memory associated with the realization of this imagined creation is registered and tagged as its own representative objectification for repeated contemplation.

What else can serve this kind of function, in confinement? Clearly, the creation of creative work ticks off these boxes. The moral is obvious: when under quarantine, write!