Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Map
Copyright
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
Abbreviations of Book Titles
1. Travel in Brief
2. The Navel of the World
3. The Pleasures of Railways
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel
5. Travelers on Their Own Books
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?
7. The Things That They Carried
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone
10. Travel as an Ordeal
11. English Travelers on Escaping England
12. When You're Strange
13. It Is Solved by Walking
14. Travel Feats
15. Staying home
16. Imaginary Journeys
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
20. Imaginary People
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited
22. Traveler's Bliss
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
27. The Essential Tao of Travel
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
The Tao of Travel
Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
Paul Theroux
Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Map
Copyright
Contents
Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere
Abbreviations of Book Titles
1. Travel in Brief
2. The Navel of the World
3. The Pleasures of Railways
4. Murphy's Rules of Travel
5. Travelers on Their Own Books
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling?
7. The Things That They Carried
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone
10. Travel as an Ordeal
11. English Travelers on Escaping England
12. When You're Strange
13. It Is Solved by Walking
14. Travel Feats
15. Staying home
16. Imaginary Journeys
17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere
18. Rosenblum's Rules of Reporting
19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable
20. Imaginary People
21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited
22. Traveler's Bliss
23. Classics of a Sense of Place
24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place
25. Dangerous, happy, Alluring
26. Five Travel Epiphanies
27. The Essential Tao of Travel
Acknowledgments
Permissions and Credits
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Boston New York
2011
Copyright © 2011 by Paul Theroux
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theroux, Paul.
The tao of travel : enlightenments from lives on the road / Paul Theroux.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-547-33691-6
1. Travel—Anecdotes. 2. Travelers—Anecdotes. I. Title.
G180.T54 2011
910.4—dc22 2010042022
Book design by Lisa Diercks
The text of this book is set in Miller.
Printed in China
SCP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Permissions and credits follow the index.
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. Travelers on Their Own Books [>]
6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling? [>]
Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson [>]
7. The Things That They Carried [>]
8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions [>]
9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone [>]
Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton [>]
10. Travel as an Ordeal [>]
11. English Travelers 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. Travelers' 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 [>]
Acknowledgments [>]
Index of People and Places [>]
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.