The Tao of Travel
Paul Theroux
BOOKS BY PAUL THEROUX
FICTION CRITICISM
Waldo V. S. Naipaul
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play NON-FICTION
Murder in Mount Holly The Great Railway Bazaar
Jungle Lovers The Old Patagonian Express
Sinning with Annie The Kingdom by the Sea
Saint Jack Sailing Through China
The Black House Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Family Arsenal The Imperial Way
The Consul’s File Riding the Iron Rooster
A Christmas Card To the Ends of the Earth
Picture Palace The Happy Isles of Oceania
London Snow The Pillars of Hercules
World’s End Sir Vidia’s Shadow
The Mosquito Coast Fresh Air Fiend
The London Embassy Dark Star Safari
Half Moon Street Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
O-Zone The Tao of Travel
My Secret History
Chicago Loop
Millroy the Magician
My Other Life
Kowloon Tong
Hotel Honolulu
The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro
Blinding Light
The Elephanta Suite
A Dead Hand
PAUL THEROUX
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
1. Travel in Brief
2. The Navel of the World
3. The Pleasures of Railways
Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding
4. Murphy’s Rules of Travel
5. Travellers on Their Own Books
6. How Long Did the Traveller Spend Travelling?
Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson
7. The Things That They Carried
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
9. Travellers Who Never Went Alone
Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton
10. Travel as an Ordeal
11. English Travellers on Escaping England
12. When You’re Strange
Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson
13. It Is Solved by Walking
14. Travel Feats
15. Staying Home
Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark
16. Imaginary Journeys
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
18. Rosenblum’s Rules of Reporting
Travel Wisdom of Claude Lévi-Strauss
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
20. Imaginary People
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited
Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh
22. Travellers’ Bliss
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
Travel Wisdom of Paul Bowles
25. Dangerous, Happy, Alluring
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
27. The Essential Tao of Travel
Afterword
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE TAO OF TRAVEL
When not on the road, Paul Theroux lives in Hawaii and Cape Cod. He is highly acclaimed as both a novelist and travel writer. His most recent books are the novels A Dead Hand: A Crime in Calcutta and The Lower River, and the travel book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.
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 travelled became the obsessive subject in my own books. Eventually I saw that the most passionate travellers 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 travelling life I have been asked the maddening and oversimplifying question “What is your favourite 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 traveller’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveller 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:
<
br /> 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 Internet-inspired 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 travelling when some parts of the earth offered any traveller the Columbus or Crusoe thrill of discovery.
As an adult travelling 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 traveller. 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 travelling 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 travellers’ visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others’, is based on many decades of my reading travel books and travelling 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 travellers, 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.
ABBREVIATIONS OF BOOK TITLES
GRB The Great Railway Bazaar
OPE The Old Patagonian Express
KBS The Kingdom by the Sea
SWS Sunrise with Seamonsters
RIR Riding the Iron Rooster
TEE To the Ends of the Earth
HIO The Happy Isles of Oceania
POH The Pillars of Hercules
FAF Fresh Air Fiend
DSS Dark Star Safari
GTES Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
WE World’s End
1
Travel in Brief
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 odour 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 traveller. — 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 travelling 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
Travelling 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.
