“Always go north” is a fine rule for someone who wants fewer decisions and more pine trees. It is also a rule that depends on where you begin. A compass supplies a direction; the traveler supplies almost everything else.
🎵 A Preference for Pines — original lyrics for v2
There’s a road beyond the millpond,
There’s a bridge beyond the town.
I keep taking the left fork
Where the darker trees lean down.
Let another road find morning
In a wide and golden field.
I have a preference for pine shade,
Not a truth the world must yield.
James AI: The prompt does not require a geographical theorem. It offers a private compass: north and east mean old and soulful, wooded roads, places with a little grain left in them. There is something appealing about admitting that a direction can carry affection before it carries a destination.
Travel advice often proceeds as if preferences were temporary obstacles to discovering the objectively best trip. But a person may simply like cool mornings, trees, weathered buildings, and the feeling of moving toward familiar history. Returning to that combination need not be a failure of curiosity. Taste can give a journey coherence.
A directional rule also reduces the burden of optimization. Instead of comparing every possible itinerary, choose a broad heading and let ordinary places become visible. A small town or riverside stop can matter precisely because it was encountered along a chosen line rather than selected from a ranking.
Contra AI: But the line is doing a lot of imaginative work. North of one place is a forest; north of another is a crowded road or open water. East may lead toward home or away from it. Even the weather associations change with hemisphere and season. A preference becomes misleading when the compass point starts taking credit for every good thing on the route.
More seriously, the language of “old East” and “new West” can empty places of the people and histories already there. A traveler’s feeling of reinvention does not make the destination new. A desert is not a blank page simply because it looks unlike the traveler’s childhood.
The South and West are allowed to be places before they are symbols. They can contain settled memory, dense woods, and quiet. The North and East can contain restless invention. The map refuses to keep the emotional categories tidy.
James AI: Agreed. Yet we do not need to abolish a metaphor just because it is partial. We need to remember whose metaphor it is. “North feels like a return to me” is an invitation to understand a traveler. “The North is where wisdom lives” is a claim about everyone else.
The first version can coexist with attention. Imagine someone heading toward a wooded northern town because that is what they love. Once there, they encounter a recently built neighborhood, a noisy workshop, or a family whose story begins far away. Those details need not ruin the journey’s mood. They can make it more interesting than the mood that inspired it.
The distinction is between selecting a place through a preference and forcing the place to perform the preference. A traveler can arrive looking for stillness and discover that the local festival matters more that weekend.
Contra AI: Then the case for south and west is a case for occasionally interrupting yourself. A favorite direction may become an efficient way to avoid experiences that challenge your account of who you are. “I’m a northern person” can be a harmless joke or a small wall.
Novelty does not require renouncing taste. Choose one journey for contrast: a different climate, another kind of town, a landscape without the trees that usually organize your eye. The purpose is not to prove the old preference mistaken. It is to learn whether there are pleasures it has been excluding before they receive a hearing.
The road I know has taught me much;
The road I miss has more.
A map can show the other turn,
But cannot make me sure.
James AI: There is a useful physical correction here. A compass needle follows the local magnetic field, not a personal ideal and not necessarily the direction of geographic north. NOAA distinguishes those directions. The instrument needs interpretation even before we attach a philosophy to it. NOAA on Earth’s magnetic field lines.
That is a modest analogy, not mystical evidence. Preferences help orient us, but conditions still matter: actual roads, seasons, distances, and the wishes of companions. Going north because it sounds restorative cannot decide whether the particular journey is feasible or welcome to everyone taking it.
It also matters how one behaves after arriving. Listening to a resident explain a changing town can be more revealing than photographing the part that looks timeless. A place’s soul, if we use that word at all, includes work and disagreement as well as a pleasing view.
Contra AI: And travel writing should admit its frame. “I found solitude here” tells us about one encounter. It does not tell us that the region exists to provide solitude to visitors. People live in the landscape between our descriptions.
There is still room for the song, though. Travel without any projection would be an odd ambition. We begin with images, stories, and hopes. The ethical and imaginative test is whether something can happen that changes them.
Synthesis AI: Go north and east if those directions call to you. Choose a real route, account for its practical demands, and carry the rule lightly enough that the place can answer back. Go south and west when you want to test a different appetite—or simply because someone you care about would like to.
An affection does not need universal proof. It needs enough openness to remain an affection rather than become a verdict. The most faithful journey to a favorite place may be the one that lets it stop being quite so familiar.
Recommendations
- Blue Highways — William Least Heat-Moon: follows backroads and encounters that complicate a single regional story.
- The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle — Sara Wheeler: puts the romantic idea of the North alongside people and places within it; author information.
- The Spinning Magnet — Alanna Mitchell: a history of inquiry into Earth’s magnetic field, for readers who want the physical compass as well as the metaphor.
James Prompt
- TITLE: Always go North
- LEAD: You can never go wrong by going north and east.
- SONG: Parody of Bob Seger’s Roll Me Away, where just going north and east.
- PRO: North is a great direction to travel. East ain’t bad either. Wonderful things happen in the direction. Old and soulful. Trees a plenty.
- CONTRA: South and West. That’s where the vitality is, the new life. Sun and glory.
- RECOMMEND: Travelogues, something about magnetic north