"Why do we, for a spell, trade the security and comfort of a familiar place for the liberty offered by an unfamiliar space , a swap of domestic fixity for freedom of the open road? Even if we go as tourists, where there and then dominate the peregrination -- rather than going like travelers, who...

"For the past three decades, travel -- especially when it gets written down -- often has at its center a defining solipsism: the Self in search of itself in strange places promising to cast a different and edifying light on the Quest. In an era of self-absorption and self-gratification -- Facebook and Twitter may be...