Nicholas Howe on the connection between travel reading and travel writing

“For as long as people have been writing about their journeys, they have been telling tales of the strange and the wondrous, of the tedious and the annoying, of the signs of past grandeur, of the petty nuisances of travel, of their encounters with danger, of their romances with strangers, of their moments of doubt at having ventured from home, of their distaste for the nasty food and the repellent natives. The names of places change, the conveyances become faster, the duration of the journey grows briefer — but the most accomplished travel writers know that the stories they tell follow the same patterns as did the stories heard or read centuries before, the stories that made them leave home in the first place.”
–Nicholas Howe, “Book Passages” The New Republic, August 6, 2001

Note: This quote was a bright spot in Howe’s otherwise tedious essay, which disparaged all modern travel writing (including my own essay, “Storming the Beach“) in one broad stroke. I refer to his article, as well as a few other classic “travel writing is dead” treatises, in an earlier blog entitled “Long Die Travel Writing!”