• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Eleni Gage

Author, Journalist, Pop Folklorist

  • About
  • Books
    • Lucky In Love
    • The Ladies of Managua
    • Other Waters
    • North of Ithaka
  • Blog
  • Articles
    • Travel
    • Essays and Reviews
    • Lifestyle
  • Talks
    • Book Clubs
  • Contact

What the Frigate?

October 12, 2012 by Eleni |

This post is a guest post I wrote for the “Great Authors” section of Andrea Peskind Katz’s fabulous blog, “Great Thoughts”.

When I was in high school, every year the faculty awarded one student a book stamped with a bookplate that showed two children under a tree reading, and the maxim “There is no frigate like a book.”

The teacher presenting the award must have explained that a frigate is a ship, and that the line comes from an Emily Dickinson poem celebrating literary journeys, but I don’t remember anyone ever doing so. I was too busy trying not to laugh at the sound of a teacher saying “frigate.”

I later realized that Emily was onto something in linking traveling and reading. One of the things I love about traveling is the way it reduces you to your essential self; being in a new place, without your beloved friends and well-known possessions, you’re no longer the person you’ve carefully constructed over time, but the soul you simply exist as. The thing I love about reading is the opposite—it removes you from yourself, forcing you to imagine, almost to become, other people, to care about their joys and sorrows.

Me reading on the beach, while pregnant.

When I started writing myself, I focused on journeys, both spiritual and physical. My travel memoir, North of Ithaka, details the year I spent living in a small Greek village overseeing the rebuilding of my grandparents’ home. And my novel, Other Waters, follows Maya Das, a psychiatrist who thinks her family has been cursed, as she voyages from New York to India and back in an attempt to forge one identity while ricocheting between two cultures.

My absolute favorite journey, though, is the kind that is both literary and physical: I love walking into a hotel room in a non-English speaking country to find that a fellow traveler has left an English language novel behind for me to discover. When I was 18 and traversing Greece reporting for the Let’s Go travel guides, I came across a copy of Lace on the island of Corfu. I would have been embarrassed to sit on the T reading the potboiler back in Boston, but it gave me hours of delight on various Greek beaches and buses. A decade or so later, I spent a day hurtling through Mexico in the backseat of a van, reading A Passage to India. The two countries—both vibrant, mystical, poor, gorgeous—seemed to overlap, turning one journey into two and making me vow to visit India one day. It was more than a great read; to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, it was a frigate miracle.

Filed Under: travel, writing Tagged With: Greece, Mexico, reading

Primary Sidebar

Get lucky!

Subscribe to my blog,
theliminalstage for
updates, articles, and
auspicious rituals.

Eleni Gage

About Eleni

The daughter of a Greek father and a Minnesotan mother. I grew up in Athens, Greece, and the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts—
and became obsessed with cultural rituals and traditions along the way.

read more

Lucky in Love

is a guide to planning a wedding that’s unique, meaningful, and, above all, auspicious, with the help of customs from all over the world

Buy Now

Latest Blog Posts

Memories, Mansplaining, and the Bestseller I Never Wrote

A couple of weeks ago I woke up thinking about a man who is not my husband. He's someone I went out with over a decade ago and there was no reason he ...

Read more about Memories, Mansplaining, and the Bestseller I Never Wrote

Young Love: Spellbound by Syros

The challenge of travel, for me, is time. My nostalgia vein runs deep, so I constantly want to return to the places I love, and when I'm there, I ...

Read more about Young Love: Spellbound by Syros

Footer

Travel Writing

I love covering places that inspire me—from Greece to Nicaragua and everywhere in between—for outlets such as Travel+Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, InStyle and more. Join me on my trips here.

 

Essays and Reviews

From parenting to politics to pop culture, I’ve got opinions —and I’m not afraid to share them in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Learn why I’m a bad mom here.

Lifestyle Articles

I may not always live my best life, but I’m trying to live a better one! I enjoy learning from the experts when writing about everything from reading more to wasting less. Pick up some tips here.

Copyright © 2023 Eleni Gage. All Rights Reserved.