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“The pleasure of travel increases in direct proportion to the decrease of baggage.”
–Richard Halliburton, Royal Road to Romance (1925)
“O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web / Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech, / Feed the gaping need of my sense, give me ad lib / To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech / For this soul needs to be honored with a new dress woven / From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.”
–Patrick Kavanagh, “Canal Bank Walk” (1958)
“Returning to a place is one of the little pleasures of travel: you perceive it differently over the years, and it reminds you of who you once were, and often enough the whole experience spills over into a thoroughly pleasant melancholy.”
–Richard Todd, “Las Vegas, ‘Tis of Thee”, The Atlantic, February 2001
“You can’t ever dream up the perfect travel formula while you’re still sitting at home. What seems like paradise when you’re planning your travels — be it white sand beaches, archaeological wonders or exotic textile markets — will eventually seem somewhat normal after a few weeks or months of living on the road. Moreover, so many new things will happen in the process of reaching these places that you’ll probably outgrow your original travel motivations. As new experiences and insights take you in surprising new directions, you’ll gradually come to understand why longtime travelers insist that the journey itself is far more important than any destination.”
–Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)
This morning I awoke to discover that — in less than 12 hours — the Amazon.com ranking of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel had fallen over 6000 points, from 2109th to 8216th. It was as if, overnight, the significance of my book had shrunk to a measly fraction of its former size. This is not the first time something like this has happened in the three weeks since the book has been out, and it can make publishing feel like playing the stock market in some third world country.
Moreover, it makes me wonder what neophyte authors had to obsess over back in the dark ages (say, ten years ago) before Internet merchandizing took the world by storm. After all, on websites like Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, an author can now spend literally hours a week brooding over the status of his book. For all practical purposes it
“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in its frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”
–Freya Stark
My thanks to Geoff Matthews of Australia for sending this quote to me. A question, however: Does anyone know where and when it originally appeared?
“My writing derived from the conviction I conceived during my college years: one should lead one’s life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic, and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted. Writing is a way of ensuring that you pay enough attention along the way to understand what you see.”
–Jeffrey Tayler, RolfPotts.com interview, March 2002
If there has been a distinctive moment that has defined my travels in recent weeks, it came this evening at a steakhouse-cum-strip-club in Portland, Oregon, called the Acropolis. There, amidst bare-breasted go-go dancers and pitchers of beer, I got a new perspective on what will no doubt prove to be one of the most unusual journeys of my life: a month-long book tour.
Indeed, if there’s irony in traveling to promote a book about travel – there is double irony in traveling at breakneck pace to promote a book that extols the virtues of traveling slowly. Since 2003 began some three weeks ago, I have journeyed from the humid streets of Bangkok to the breezy beaches of Southern California; from the frozen prairies of Kansas, to the drizzly forests of the Pacific Northwest. Then, starting next Monday in Seattle – and lasting an entire month – I will barnstorm down the U.S. West Coast, through the Midwest, and out to New York to promote Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. At a string of bookstores, and on various radio and television shows, I will spend lots of time urging people to travel deliberately – but my tour itinerary is packed so tightly that I doubt I’ll be able to put much of my travel advice into practice. And this very contradiction has made me even more interested in how these travels will go. After all, my near inability to practice what I preach on the road stands to give this journey a distinctively postmodern vibe.
“What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I liked having goals.”
–David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000)
