Category — Said

But: All journeys were return journeys.  The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles.

The man who says, ‘I’ve got a wife and kids’ is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan.  But he does not know – how could he – that the changing scenes… are nothing compared to the change in himself.”

–Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

Paul Theroux, the notoriously cranky travel writer, offers this observation in his new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing 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 on 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 traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological.”

So much of who we are is where we have been.”
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—William Langewiesche, journalist, author and pilot

A midlife crisis is when a person reaches the top of the ladder only to find they’ve placed it against the wrong wall.”

— Joseph Campbell, writer and mythology professor