Paul Theroux: The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

GTES

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

WE

World's End

The Necessity to Move

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

— D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921)

Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is "Out-sickness." When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.

— Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen (2005)

The Road Is Life

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1958)

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.

— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back. — DSS

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills. — POH

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience. — FAF

The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still. — SWS

It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling. — GTES

Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. — FAF

Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler. — POH

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough. — POH

In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel's pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain. — KBS

Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts. — GRB

All travel is circular… After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home. — GRB

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell. — HIO

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere. — POH

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home — indeed, looking for the perfect memory. — FAF

When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, "Nowhere." Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness. — OPE

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home. — GTES

One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest. — GTES

I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood — hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey. — DSS

Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges's view, floated beautifully through his poem "Happiness" ( La Dicha ), that in our encounters with the world, "everything happens for the first time" Just as "whoever embraces a woman is Adam," and "whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,"anyone's first view of the Sphinx sees it new: "In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted… Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal." — DSS

Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.

— Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l'Italie (1807)

Two Paradoxes of Travel

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the roller-coaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

— Carson McCullers, "Look Homeward, Americans," Vogue (1940)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one's own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (1982)

Solitary Travel

Solitary Travelers: Neither sleepy nor deaf men are fit to travel quite alone. It is remarkable how often the qualities of wakefulness and watchfulness stand every party in good stead.

— Sir Francis Galton, The Art of Travel (1855)

Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non sequiturs, shattering your concentration with "Oh, look, it's raining" and "You see a lot of trees here. "

It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest. — OPE

In the best travel, disconnection is a necessity. Concentrate on where you are; do no back-home business; take no assignments; remain incommunicado; be scarce. It is a good thing that people don't know where you are or how to find you. Keep in mind the country you are in. That's the theory. — GTES

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion. — OPE

The whole point of traveling is to arrive alone, like a specter, in a strange country at nightfall, not in the brightly lit capital but by the back door, in the wooded countryside, hundreds of miles from the metropolis, where, typically, people didn't see many strangers and were hospitable and do not instantly think of you as money on two legs. Arriving in the hinterland with only the vaguest plans is a liberating event. It can be a solemn occasion for discovery, or more like an irresponsible and random haunting of another planet. — GTES