The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
Interpretation
Travel books evoke the feeling of exploration and uniqueness associated with discovering new places.
In this quote, Paul Theroux expresses how travel books inspire readers by providing a sense of adventure and individuality, similar to the iconic explorers Robinson Crusoe and Christopher Columbus. They allow individuals to experience the thrill of being an outsider in unfamiliar territories, capturing the essence of discovery and personal transformation that comes with travel.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a travel book club to inspire deeper discussion about the essence of travel.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.
...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.
One doesn't come to Italy for niceness," was the retort; "one comes for life. Buon giorno! Buon giorno!
Pack a pillow and blanket and see as much of the world as you can.You will not regret it.
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