The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates “The Contents of Some Travelers Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in “Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Therouxs own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: 

Vladimir Nabokov           J.R.R. Tolkien 

Samuel Johnson               Eudora Welty

Evelyn Waugh                  Isak Dinesen 

Charles Dickens               James Baldwin 

Henry David Thoreau       Pico Iyer 

Mark Twain                     Anton Chekhov 

Bruce Chatwin                  John McPhee

Freya Stark                      Peter Matthiessen 

Graham Greene                Ernest Hemingway

 The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River 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.

Contents

Preface: The Importance of Elsewhere ix

1. Travel in Brief 1

2. The Navel of the World 23

3. The Pleasures of Railways 26

Travel Wisdom of Henry Fielding 39

4. Murphys Rules of Travel 41

5. Travelers on Their Own Books 47

6. How Long Did the Traveler Spend Traveling? 55

Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson 75

7. The Things That They Carried 78

8. Fears, Neuroses, and Other Conditions 85

9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone 93

Travel Wisdom of Sir Francis Galton 105

10. Travel as an Ordeal 108

11. English Travelers on Escaping England 117

12. When Youre Strange 121

Travel Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson 127

13. It Is Solved by Walking 130

14. Travel Feats 147

15. Staying Home 158

Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark 167

16. Imaginary Journeys 171

17. Everything Is Edible Somewhere 181

18. Rosenblums Rules of Reporting 198

Travel Wisdom of Claude Lévi-Strauss 201

19. Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable 203

20. Imaginary People 210

21. Writers and the Places They Never Visited 215

Travel Wisdom of Evelyn Waugh 231

22. Travelers Bliss 234

23. Classics of a Sense of Place 238

24. Evocative Name, Disappointing Place 256

Travel Wisdom of Paul Bowles 259

25. Dangerous, Happy, Alluring 262

26. Five Travel Epiphanies 271

27. The Essential Tao of Travel 275

Acknowledgments 277

Index of People and Places 279