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? βShe drove me to my practice at four in the morning,β 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.
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
I like to say, 'I spend one-third of my time in Nigeria, one-third in Europe or America, and one-third on a plane.'
Eating's not a bad way to get to know a place.
In order to live in a different country, you have to love something there. You have to love something there. You have to love either the spirit of the laws or the economic opportunities, or the - well, history of the country, the language perhaps, literature.
So travel for me is an act of discovery and of responsibility as well a grand adventure and a constant liberation.
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends
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