The Tao of Travel

writing a novel: fiction requires close concentration and intense imagining, a leap of faith, magic almost. But a travel book, I discovered, was more the work of my left hand, and it was a deliberate act—like the act of travel itself. It took health and strength and confidence.—

TEE

On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.—

RIR

One of the reasons we are still ignorant of what space travel or lunar exploration is like: no astronaut has shown any ability to convey the experience in writing. There has never been a Melville on the moon, or even an Updike.—

FAF

Lawrence's journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books—the eye slowly taking it all in, the aching feet imposing the leisure to observe the common people in the smoky inn kitchen.

—Anthony Burgess, Introduction,

Lawrence and Italy

(1972)

[Henry Miller's

Colossus of Maroussi]

has all the normal stigmata of the travel book, the fake intensities, the tendency to discover the "soul" of a town after spending two hours in it, the boring descriptions of conversations with taxi-drivers.

—George Orwell, in the weekly

Tribune,

December 4, 1942, in

Orwell: Complete Works

(1968)

The Speed of Travel

I came to realize that I traveled best when I traveled no faster than a dog could trot.

—Gardner McKay,

Journey Without a Map

(2009)

Time Travel

The best of travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life.—

GTES

Travel is so often an experiment with time. In Third World countries I felt I had dropped into the past, and I had never accepted the notion of timelessness anywhere. Most countries had specific years. In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is twenty years ago in the Soviet Union, ten in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. Britain and the United States were the present—but the present contains the future.—

KBS

Travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion the opposite. Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.—

HIO