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

Our village shows a rural Venice,

Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;

As lovely as the Bay of Naples

Yon placid cove amid the maples;

And in my neighbor's field of corn

I recognize the Golden Horn.

In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, "I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me — that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily — and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more — What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? — The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition."

Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries traveled around the globe — Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific — Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.

Thoreau's three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville's greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of "Ktaadn." Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.

Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home

"TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel," Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.

Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? "Neurasthenic"? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveler — Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.

Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet — almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.

Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader — of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau's Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, "She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something — whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire — provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted."

Consider this poem:

Water is taught by thirst.

Land — by the Oceans passed.

Transport — by throe—

Peace — by its battles told—

Love — by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the snow.

The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by "throe" — a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line "sumptuous Destitution."

She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. "Home is a holy thing — nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals," she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And "Duty is black and brown — home is bright and shining." And again, home "is brighter than all the world beside."

Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark

English by nationality but born in Italy (in 1893), where she died a hundred years later, Freya Stark was conflicted by nature, though good-humored and appreciative in her travel. An accomplished linguist and a wonderful descriptive writer, she traveled throughout the Middle East, Turkey, and Arabia. Her books include The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1935), and Winter in Arabia (1940). She wrote, "I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs." Stark herself was famous for her hats, which she wore to cover a disfigurement of scalp and ear, resulting from a painful accident in childhood. ¶ She was one of the singular discoverers (and photographers) of traditional cultures and old ways. In her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins, she speaks of "the old days how bad and how pleasant, the new how good and how dull."

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Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

— Riding to the Tigris (1959)

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One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

— Riding to the Tigris

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The Turks, with the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world, are naturally anxious to obtain tourists, and their difficulties in this respect are caused chiefly by the quite phenomenal badness of their hotels.

— Riding to the Tigris

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We English rely for success almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second-rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own which more logical nations find difficult to master.

— Riding to the Tigris

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"How can I know what I think till I hear what I say?" The quotation came into my mind, and another one from Mr. Gladstone, who is supposed to have remarked that he never met anyone from whom he couldn't learn something, but it was not always worth while to find out what it was. Perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and for writing, too.