What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget it has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry.
     - Basho

What must be borne in mind in reading the travel sketches by Basho is that travels in his day had to be made under very precarious conditions, and that few people, if any, thought of taking to the road merely for pleasure or pastime. Furthermore, Basho had been going through agonizing stages of self-scrutiny in the years immediately preceding the travels, so that it was quite certain that, when he left his house, he thought there was no other alternative before him. To put it more precisely, Basho had been casting away his earthly attachments, one by one, in the years preceding the journey, and now he had nothing else to cast away but his own self which was in him as well as around him. He had to cast this self away, for otherwise he was not able to restore his true identity (what he calls ‘the everlasting self of poetry’ in the passage above). He saw a tenuous chance of achieving his final goal in traveling, and he left his house ‘caring naught for his provisions in the state of sheer ecstasy’.
- Nobuyuki Yuasa, from the Introduction, Matsuo Basho: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

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