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You were ever so right about travel changing and enlarging one's personality, framing new perspectives, awakening new insights, creating a broader sense of tolerance and sympathy. The need for the making of a new world is so terribly apparent; a world free from oppressive traditions, prejudices and intolerance.
... initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.
...we can still recognize [patterns of iniation], together with other structures of religious experience, in the imaginative and dream life of modern man. But we recognize them too in certain types of real ordeals that he undergoes---in the spiritual crises, the solitude and despair through which every human being must pass in order to attain to a responsible, genuine, and creative life. Even if the initiatory character of these ordeals is not apprehended as such, it remains true nonetheless that man becomes himself only after having solved a series of desperately difficult and even dangerous situations; that is, after having undergone "tortures" and "death," followed by an awakening to another life, qualitatively different because regenerated.
An American ambulance driver is a fellow who comes to France to save Humanity. But by the time he has been on the western front for a couple of weeks, his efforts in this pursuit have been concentrated on one integral portion of the whole in the animated endeavor to save himself.
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