The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
Interpretation
Travel books evoke the feeling of exploration and uniqueness associated with discovering new places.
In this quote, Paul Theroux expresses how travel books inspire readers by providing a sense of adventure and individuality, similar to the iconic explorers Robinson Crusoe and Christopher Columbus. They allow individuals to experience the thrill of being an outsider in unfamiliar territories, capturing the essence of discovery and personal transformation that comes with travel.
In practice
This quote can be shared at a travel book club to inspire deeper discussion about the essence of travel.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
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.
Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life
The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
Of travel I've had my share, man, I've been everywhere.
I've been lucky to travel and work all over the world through the lens of the back of the house, and I love that monocle. I love that lens, because it's real people.
It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
When you # travel , you experience, in a very practical way, the act of # rebirth .
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