This is how he starts the book:
"You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller's personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler." (p.1)
2 comments:
charles - you have disappeared from Facebook and I have no way of contacting you. Please let me know you are OK - we need a catch up.
I forgot to say: it sounds like Theroux is writing about you in that paragraph. That's the exact sentiment you once expressed to me whilst throwing all your clothes in a duffel bag and leaving town in the middle of the night. I understood what you were saying, without words, but Theroux has precisely captured your restless itch to keep moving. Some would say traveller, but others would say voluntary refugee.
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