'Journeys like artists are born and not made. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures- and the best of them lead not only outwards in space, but inwards as well.'
             Discuss this statement in relation to the texts on journeys that you have studied this year.
             Both journeys and artists possess some inherent qualities from their birth which define, in some ways, the course of their futures.However the impact of environment and 'nurture' are probably more influential than individual characteristics gifted at birth. William Shakespeare, for instance, could not have written great works such as The Tempest if he had been born into a society without a written form of language, or had been a woman born at the same time, as Virginia Woolf demonstrates in her famous A Room of One's Own. His journey and his life would have been remarkably different; and whilst his brilliant faculties would still have resided within him, without a source of outlet he would have died a a death as ignominious as the rest of the vast mass of humanity, rather than being remembered four hundred years later as the greatest English writer of all time. Similarly, in the BOS Stimulus booklet, Shirley Geok-lin Lim makes clear the importance of an 'external geography', and Margaret Atwood's 'Journey to the Interior' also emphasises the vast defining influence that environment has upon the individual and their journey. And again, in John Keats' poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci', the knight's journey is created by the interaction of both the interior values that he holds and the exterior malevolent manipulation of 'La Belle', whilst 'The Little Prince''s journey is inspired both by an innocent idealism that could not exist without his isolation from the rest of humanity, and indeed, at the last he kills himself to escape the ugliness of it, which he cannot reconcile with the goodness and truth which is the aim of his search.
             The characters of The Te...