The tao of travel Enlightenments from lives on the road

Review by New York Times Review

THOREAU said he couldn't preserve his health and spirits unless he spent four hours a day "sauntering." Rousseau passed most of his last 15 years in walking. "Everything is finished for me on earth," he declared, a touch melodramatically. "People can no longer do good or evil to me. . . . Here I am, tranquil at the bottom of the abyss, a poor unfortunate mortal, but unperturbed, like God himself." Wordsworth walked about 180,000 miles in his lifetime, in spite of being "not a well-made man," according to Thomas De Quincey (who added that his friend's legs were "serviceable"). When a visitor asked Wordsworth's servant to show him his study, she answered: "Here is his library, but his study is out of doors." Walking is only one of the means of travel explored in this ruminative volume by Paul Theroux, but these are the kinds of interesting odds and ends you're apt to come across. Like a musty old attic, "The Tao of Travel" is a book to be plundered and raided. Part gossip, part philosophy, it covers a lot of the angles on literary travel. Why do people travel? Is it only, as Philip Larkin suggested, "a deliberate step backwards" in order to create a new objective, namely homecoming? Henry James apparently traveled from spa to spa in search of relief from what Theroux describes as "an almost constant state of constipation." Geoffrey Moorhouse crossed the Sahara the long way (west to east) in hopes of curing his fear of solitude and empty spaces. Theroux himself says: "From an early age I longed to leave home and to keep going. I cannot imagine not traveling." Here he comes home to his library and takes us on a journey around his favorite authors. Most books clearly belong on bookshelves, and some on coffee tables. Others are known in Britain as "loo books" - ideal companions for those sedentary moments of solitude. "The Tao of Travel," part compendium of quotations, part miscellany of literary pondering, might be one of those. Yet it's also a more philosophical undertaking than that might imply. Despite its promotion into the serious league of literature, travel writing has remained something like the opera of letters: inherently bourgeois, faintly redolent of its imperialist past. The traveler here is emphatically not a tourist; he (usually not she) is a connoisseur of place whose aesthetic is other people's lives. Contemporary travel writing still has the occasional reek of leather armchairs and gin, of old colonial maps. But no genre is more than the minds that have contributed to it, and some marvelous literary sensibilities have given themselves to travel writing. Theroux offers both quotations from and anecdotes about many of the best of them. More or less a commonplace book whose merit lies in its capacity to offer random delight rather than coherent argument, "The Tao of Travel" is as likely to land you with Pico Iyer as Emily Dickinson, Samuel Johnson as Bronislaw Malinowski. There are chapters on exotic meals (seal flipper, bear paw, adolescent human blood), travel ordeals, the English abroad, railways and imaginary travels. Theroux quotes a little freely from his own works, but given the introspective nature of the project and the fact that he's reflecting on a lifetime of traveling and reading, that seems understandable. AFTER all, he too was a member of the backpack generation of the 1960s. But as I read about the many writers who couldn't live without walking, I found myself reflecting on how I now find a walk anywhere, even central London, more edifying and salutary than any exotic bus journey. Is it possible that the great appeal of youthful travel was less the farflung destination than the backpacking - the hiking - itself? In any case, an amble round a library seems a fitting summary to a travel writing career. As Emily Dickinson said: "There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away." Henry Shukman's latest book is a novel, "The Lost City."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

As a travel writer, Theroux has few contemporary rivals and no peers. His many books have hammered home the axiom that in meaningful travel the destination is never as significant as the journey itself. Theroux's descriptive faculties and his deft, if often pitiless, eye for the insincere and the dishonest in the array of characters he encounters on his worldwide voyages leave readers indelibly haunted. Theroux's admirers will welcome this anthology of those travel accounts that he himself has found admirable or influential or enlightening for his own literary achievements. A fecund resource for anyone who might wish to follow in Theroux's footsteps, this is a remarkably perceptive and incisive annotated bibliography of travel books. Having surveyed this array of literature and having pursued the peripatetic existence, Theroux arrives at a destination: 10 brief commandments that serve as a vade mecum for travel and for life itself.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Travel maestro Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar) conducts a rambling tour of the genre in this diverting meditation on passages from his own and other writers' works. Several chapters spotlight underappreciated travel writers from Samuel Johnson to Paul Bowles, while others explore themes both profound and whimsical. There are classic set-piece literary evocations, including Thoreau on the hush of the Maine woods and Henry James on the miserable pleasures of Venice. A section on storied but disappointing destinations fingers Tahiti as "a mildewed island of surly colonials"; travel epics-shipwrecks, Sahara crossings, Jon Krakauer's duel with Mount Everest-are celebrated; exotic meals are recalled (beetles, monkey eyes, and human flesh, anyone?); and some writers, like Emily Dickinson, just stay home and write about that. The weakest section is a compendium of aphoristic abstractions-"Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion"-while the strongest pieces descry a tangible place through a discerning eye and pungent sensibility: "I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of [Mt.] Etna at sunset," Evelyn Waugh rhapsodizes; "[n]othing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting." Photos. (May 26) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar) is considered the doyen of travel writers. Despite a promising concept, his latest book is not his best. Theroux takes excerpts of great travel writing (from the likes of Samuel Johnson, Evelyn Waugh, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Graham Greene, and Ernest Hemingway) and sprinkles them in 27 thematic chapters-e.g., "Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions," "Travel as an Ordeal," "Travelers' Bliss," and "Classics of a Sense of Place"-which, unsurprisingly, have little to do with Taoism. The first chapter, which is made up of snippets from Theroux's many books, is tedious and forgettable. It is only when the chapters include longer texts from other writers that one gets a better feel for the travelers and their situations. VERDICT True Theroux fans will be happy to add this title to their collections. Others may enjoy excerpts and perhaps be inspired to read the original works, but this is not a book for the casual reader of travel writing. [See Prepub Alert, 11/15/10.]-Lee Arnold, Historical Soc. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

From prolific travel writer and novelist Theroux (A Dead Hand, 2011, etc.), an eclectic compendium of travel-related trivia, quotes, quips and advice.Travel is a metaphor for living; the line between the travels and the traveler is fine; in the words of the Buddha, "You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself." These ideas, the author explains in the preface to this curious anthology, comprise the essential philosophy behind this determinedly personal collection of travel appreciation. In a series of short chapters, Theroux looks at life on the road from perspectives that range from the predictable to the delightfully quirky. The author includes quotes from writers he admires, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Evelyn Waugh and Robert Louis Stevenson. British men are particularly well-represented. Sections on "Travel in Brief" and "The Pleasures of Railways" quote substantially from Theroux's own work, and the final chapter, "The Essential Tao of Travel," a list of ten pieces of travel advice to live by, is surprisingly unimaginative, with suggestions like "Travel light" and "Keep a journal." Interspersed among this routine anthologizing, however, is a series of whimsical chapters that are often wonderfully playfulmany readers may wish that Theroux had scrapped some of the quotations and included more of these sections. Equally engaging are the author's brief rumination on disgusting meals and how they tasted and his quick peek into the lives of the spouses, friends and lovers who went along for the ride as largely invisible sidekicks on some of history's great travel adventures.Alternatively pious and irreverent, this is an uneasy almanac of favorite quotes and advice for the would-be tourist that broadly features travel as a trope for personal enlightenment.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere As a child, yearning to leave home and go far away, the image in my mind was of flight -- my little self hurrying off alone. The word "travel" did not occur to me, nor did the word "transformation," which was my unspoken but enduring wish. I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith. Elsewhere was the place I wanted to be. Too young to go, I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom. Books were my road. And then, when I was old enough to go, the roads I traveled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Eventually I saw that the most passionate travelers have always also been passionate readers and writers. And that is how this book came about.  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, to bear witness to the consequences, tragic or comic, of people possessed by the narcissism of minor differences. Chekhov said, "If you're afraid of loneliness, don't marry." I would say, if you're afraid of loneliness, don't travel. The literature of travel shows the effects of solitude, sometimes mournful, more often enriching, now and then unexpectedly spiritual.  All my traveling life I have been asked the maddening and oversimplifying question "What is your favorite travel book?" How to answer it? I have been on the road for almost fifty years and writing about my travels for more than forty years. One of the first books my father read to me at bedtime when I was small was Donn Fendler: Lost on a Mountain in Maine. This 1930s as-told-to account described how a twelve-year-old boy survived eight days on Mount Katahdin. Donn suffered, but he made it out of the Maine woods. The book taught me lessons in wilderness survival, including the basic one: "Always follow a river or a creek in the direction the water is flowing." I have read many travel books since, and I have made journeys on every continent except Antarctica, which I have recounted in eight books and hundreds of essays. I have felt renewed inspiration in the thought of little Donn making it safely down the high mountain.  The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. "This is what I saw" -- news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. "They're just like us!" or "They're not like us at all!" The traveler's tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience. It's how the first novel in English got written. Daniel Defoe based Robinson Crusoe on the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk, though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk's four and a half years on a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island, adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica. The storyteller's intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering eye and riveting tale. I think of the travel writer as idealized in the lines of the ghost of Hamlet's father at the beginning of the play:   I could a tale unfold whose lightest word   Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,   Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,   Thy knotted and combined locks to part   And each particular hair to stand on end  But most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful, mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or else they ring bells like mad and seem familiar. At their best, they are examples of what is most human in travel.  In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only in speed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of the world -- much of it connected and known. This conceit of Internetinspired omniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physical effort of travel is superfluous. Yet there are many parts of the world that are little known and worth visiting, and there was a time in my traveling when some parts of the earth offered any traveler the Columbus or Crusoe thrill of discovery.  As an adult traveling alone in remote and cut-off places, I learned a great deal about the world and myself: the strangeness, the joy, the liberation and truth of travel, the way loneliness -- such a trial at home -- is the condition of a traveler. But in travel, as Philip Larkin says in his poem "The Importance of Elsewhere," strangeness makes sense.  Travel in dreams, for Freud, symbolized death. That the journey -- an essay into the unknown -- can be risky, even fatal, was a natural conclusion for Freud to reach, since he suffered from self-diagnosed Reiseangst, travel anxiety. He was so fearful of missing a train that he appeared at railway stations two hours ahead of time, and when the train appeared at the platform he usually panicked. He wrote in Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, "Dying is replaced in dreams by departure, by a train journey."  This has not been my experience; I associate my happiest traveling days with sitting on trains. Some travel is more of a nuisance than a hardship, but travel is always a mental challenge, and even at its most difficult, travel can be an enlightenment.  The joy of travel, and reading about it, is the theme of this collection -- and perhaps the misery too; but even remembered misery can produce lyrical nostalgia. As I was rereading some of the books quoted here I realized how dated they were, and how important as historical documents -- the dramas as well as the romance of an earlier time. Yet a lot of the old-fangledness of travel ended very recently.  This book of insights, a distillation of travelers' visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others', is based on many decades of my reading travel books and traveling the earth. It is also intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travelers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit of Buddha's dictum "You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself," I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel, ways of living and thinking too. Excerpted from The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road by Paul Theroux All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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