*A "diverting meditation on passages from his own and other writers' works. [T]he strongest pieces descry a tangible place through a discerning eye and pungent sensibility..."
-Publishers Weekly

Autorentext

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Bad Angel Brothers, The Lower River, Jungle Lover*s, and *The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Klappentext

"A book to be plundered and raided." - New York Times Book Review "A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day." - USA Today Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel contains excerpts from the best of Theroux's own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: Vladimir Nabokov Eudora Welty Evelyn Waugh James Baldwin Charles Dickens Pico Iyer Henry David Thoreau Anton Chekhov Mark Twain John McPhee Freya Stark Ernest Hemingway Graham Greene and many others "Dazzling . . . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets." - San Francisco Chronicle

Zusammenfassung
“A book to be plundered and raided.” — New York Times Book Review

“A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day.” — USA Today

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel contains excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:

*Vladimir Nabokov         Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh          James Baldwin
Charles Dickens         Pico Iyer
Henry David Thoreau         Anton Chekhov
Mark Twain         John McPhee
Freya Stark         Ernest Hemingway
Graham Greene         and many others*
“Dazzling . . . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Leseprobe

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.
 The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer
tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a
journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the
strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just
like us!” or “They’re not like us at all!” The traveler’s tale is always in the
nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler
enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.
It’s how the first novel in English got written. Daniel Defoe based
Robinson Crusoe on the actual experience of the castaway Alexander Selkirk,
though he enlarged the story, turning Selkirk’s four and a half years
on a remote Pacific Island into twenty-eight years on a Caribbean island,
adding Friday, the cannibals, and tropical exotica.
The storyteller’s intention is always to hold the listener with a glittering
eye and riveting tale. I think of the travel writer as idealized in the
lines of the ghost of Hamlet’s father at the beginning of the play:

  I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
  Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
  Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
  Thy knotted and combined locks to part
  And each particular hair to stand on end

 But most are anecdotal, amusing, instructional, farcical, boastful,
mock-heroic, occasionally hair-raising, warnings to the curious, or else
they ring bells like mad and seem familiar. At their best, they are examples
of what is most human in travel.
 In the course of my wandering life, travel has changed, not only in
speed and efficiency, but because of the altered circumstances of the
world — much of it connected and known. This conceit of Internetinspired
omniscience has produced the arrogant delusion that the physical
effort of travel is superfluous. Yet there are many parts of the world
that are little known and worth visiting, and there was a time in my traveling
when some parts of the earth offered any traveler the Columbus or
Crusoe thrill of discovery.
 As an adult traveling alone in remote and cut-off places, I learned a
great deal about the world and myself: the strangeness, the joy, the liberation
and truth of travel, the way lone…