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.
Interpretation
The desire to travel reflects fundamental human traits such as curiosity, the need for change, and the pursuit of new experiences.
In this quote, Paul Theroux explores the intrinsic motivations behind the human desire to travel. He suggests that travel is not just about physical movement, but is also tied to our innate curiosity, the wish to escape from our current realities, and the longing to connect with others and discover new environments. This urge to explore helps us grow as individuals and enriches our lives with diverse experiences, ultimately allowing us to confront fears and embrace the unknown.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of seeking new experiences.
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.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
I would like to spend the whole of my life traveling, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend at home.
Go at least once a year to a place you've never been before.
Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
For me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.
My Christmas present to myself each year is to see how much air travel can open up the world and take me to places as far from sheltered California and Japan as possible.
Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.
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