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

Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with "the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate." He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. "On this day, the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a motherlike fondness."

His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It's true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favorable wind and complaining.

"The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth." This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for "the most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose."

Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is "under the spell of witchcraft" and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding — fading again — is attended by doctors.

Toward the end of August, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full two months after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Four days later they are "thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth," the next day in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: "Our voyage was retarded." Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anticlimax: "About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffeehouse, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea."

He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premonition of his own death. Horace: "This is the end of the story, and the journey" (Hic finis chartaeque, viaeque).

Fielding died in Lisbon a little over a month after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.

Xavier de Maistre: Traveling Around His Room

A J OURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn't planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as "a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humor, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy." In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a "new mode of traveling I introduce into the world." Hyperbolic (one chapter describes "Latitude and Topography"), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.

"The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travelers… are nothing compared with my adventures in this one district." He anatomizes the pictures on the walls, his furniture, his bed: "A bed sees us born and sees us die. It is the ever changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulcher."

Kamo-no-ChŌmei: Recluse in a Remote and Tiny Hut

THE TEN FOOT Square Hut, a brief account of the withdrawal of a man from public life to a tiny hut, where he ended his days, is often compared with Thoreau's Walden. The work is attributed to Kamo-no-Chōmei, a twelfth-century Japanese aristocrat who, disappointed at being passed over for the post of warden of the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto, simply retreated, rusticating himself to the mountains, living alone, "a friend of the moon and the wind."

He was in his fifties when he forsook the world, first for a hut near Mount Hiei, and after five years he moved into greater seclusion in Hino, near Tokyo, for a hut that was hardly ten feet square and seven feet high. Like Thoreau, he describes his simple furnishings (baskets, a brazier, his straw mat, his desk). It is the ultimate in simplicity. Altogether he was a recluse for eight years, and his writing shows the effects of his retreat and renunciation and his nonattachment, achieving a Buddhist ideal. Calmly, he lists the catastrophes of all sorts — acts of God, acts of man — that have befallen Japan. And he sums up his existence in the tiny hut: "Since I forsook the world and broke off all its ties, I have felt neither fear nor resentment. I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die. Like a drifting cloud I rely on none and have no attachments. My only luxury is a sound sleep and all I look forward to is the beauty of the changing seasons."

Thoreau: Home Is the Heavenly Way

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was so emotionally attached to his home in Concord that he found it almost impossible to leave. In fact, after 1837 he did so only for short periods — thirteen days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, some visits to Cape Cod, three trips to the Maine woods, brief spells in Staten Island and Minnesota. He was never alone on these excursions; he always went with a friend or relative. Although he philosophized constantly about travel (he was widely read in the travel books of his time), he is a much better example of someone who really didn't go anywhere. The Maine trip was a team effort, and Thoreau was a follower. A Yankee in Canada is about a one-week train trip with several hundred tourists, what we would call a package tour today. He made no bones about not being a traveler. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: "Live at home like a traveler." Homesick on Staten Island, he wrote, "My thoughts revert to those dear hills… Others may say, 'Are there not the cities of Asia?' But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way" (letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Travel in your head, Thoreau preached in Walden: "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought." He went on to say that it is "easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals… than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone."

A frequent hyperbolic flourish in a Thoreau book or essay is his comparing an aspect of his neighborhood with an exotic place. And these deflations are often paradoxes. Why leave Concord when, as he wrote in a poem,