The Norton Book of Travel

...looking into the ways of strange men in order to see their own rightly...

...V. S. Naipaul runs into diabolical bureaucratic difficulty getting a couple bottles of liquor past Indian customs, and discerns therein the subcontinent's irredeemable moral ruin, not without justice...

...Held to the strictest standards of human wisdom, the traveler might seem to be just another forlorn subspecies of unaccommodated man...

...It's too easy to get most anywhere you want to go...

...however, there is a kind of passionate restlessness, perpetual motion propelled by true wonder, that is nearly as sublime, and sometimes nearly as joyous...

...Europe felt the same, no doubt, having him there...

...Although all these things have been done recently, they probably could bear repeating...

...Marco Polo's words on his return from the Orient eloquently assert the glory of the vocation: "I believe it was God's pleasure that we should get back in order that people might learn about the things that the world contains...

...and anyplace you go is getting to look increasingly like every other place—which is to say, more and more like home...

...No matter who has been there ahead of you, the world retains its primordial capacity to inspire wonder...

...Herodotus conducts an investigation into Egyptian and Phoenician religious beliefs in order better to illuminate those of the Greeks—an austerely reasonable undertaking, subtly subversive of conventional piety...

...everyone else has been where you've been and is going where you're going...

...James Boswell admiringly describes a Corsican revolutionary hero, steeped in Rousseau and Marcus Aurelius, who discourses splendidly on martial virtue, honor, and love of country...

...Samuel Johnson, of all people, is awestruck by a landscape in the Scottish Highlands patently inimical to the human presence, and he insists that a man who has not been in such a place, who has not felt the power of its desolation, cannot truly reckon his own place in the world...

...and he registers the spectacle of mass death with senses rendered exquisitely acute by danger...

...And even Truman Capote, emotionally wizened at the age of twenty-four, felt his weariness lift and the enchantment of living touch him as he listened to a young man strum a harp in a castle garden on the shore of the Lago de Garda: "It was right that I had gone to Europe, if only because I could look again with wonder...

...A man who demands exotic sensations to animate his sense of wonder does not really know where he is, for the near at hand, however plain and familiar, deserves reverent attention, and repays it by disclosing life's greatest marvels: those in one's own soul...

...Fussell considers travel to be "one of the liberal arts," and his anthology shows the traveler again and again as a man bent on searching the world for knowledge he must have, either for the incomparable pleasure that knowing brings, or in order to determine more precisely the terms according to which he ought to live, or in quest of the sacred ground where he can live freely in the way he already knows to be right...

...BOOK REVIEWS If Pascal was right and all human un- happiness stems from the inability of men to sit quietly in their own rooms, then the prince of misfortune, heir to all known miseries and doubtless to some still undiscovered, must be the born traveler, who might be unsure just where on the face of the earth he really wants to be but who knows it isn't at home...

...and who could deserve it more...

...For the finest travel writers, some driven to absorb as much of the world as they can hold, others looking for the singular place where they'll find the one thing needful, whatever that might be, travel is an "impulse . . . so imperious that it amounts to a spiritual necessity," as Robert Byron put it, six hundred years after Marco Polo...

...Whatever the misgivings that the editor and some of his chosen writers have about modern travel, the preponderant effect of this book is to strengthen the reader's eagerness to have at the world...

...inquiring after others' gods in the hope of learning how best to worship the true One...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 41...

...Bernal Diaz watches Montezuma eat tortillas...

...Pascal notwithstanding, the traveler who finds the place he's been searching for usually fills the air with shouts of pure jubilation...

...so why should anyone want to go anywhere else at all, when he need only look about him, and within himself, to know the full glory of being...

...Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road" exuberantly sets procedural guidelines for the traveler's inquiry: "Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,/They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents...

...William Carlos Williams discovers an exhilarating and decidedly pagan beauty in one of the great Florentine churches...

...Henry James, for whom neither the sea nor Sardinia would have done at all, gave equally impassioned and scarcely less demonstrative thanks for his first visit to the civilized glories of the Italian mainland: "At last—for the first time—I live...

...Held to less daunting standards, however—say, those to which one customarily holds artists rather than philosophers or mystics—many of these travelers are spiritual paragons, doing superbly and with joy the thing they were clearly made to do...

...Some men are fortunate enough to comprehend what the world is made of—or to think they do—without leaving their rooms, while others must acquire their understanding on the move, taking within themselves the hammering life of the great cities and the stunning inhumanity of wilderness...

...as much of it as a man could ever require for his happiness...

...Fussell laments...

...a serious man would consider it to be merely the dim pleasure of diversion...

...The wonder that Truman Capote felt in knowing he wasn't in Louisiana anymore, or for that matter Manhattan, is of a comparatively paltry sort...

...This estimable anthology might even have been an invaluable one had Mr...

...Wanderlust is a symptom of spiritual deficiency...

...A richer mind, a more robust soul, would feel at home wherever it happened to be set down, and would be capable of assuring its own happiness in Nottingham or even Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...Fussell left out such lesser items as Karl Philip Moritz in England, Truman Capote in Ischia, Cyril Connolly hither and yon, and instead put in Goethe and Stendhal in Italy, Dostoevsky and Herzen in Paris or London, Gide in the Congo...

...Once out, if he's of the lucky sort, he'll find air enough anywhere else...

...THE NORTON BOOK OF TRAVEL Edited by Paul Fussell/W...

...The Mona Lisa and the Great Pyramid, the Matterhorn and the Pacific at Big Sur: all the world still remains to be known anew...

...Yet despite the omission of some of the greatest travel writers, The Norton Book of Travel convincingly makes the case for the seriousness and significance of travel writing—a genre often regarded as possessing, on its better days, perhaps the wit but something less than the profundity of good light verse...

...Full of the wonder of being out and about in the world, The Norton Book of Travel, a fascinating anthology of travel writing from Herodotus to Paul Theroux, issues a provocative challenge to Pascal and the other great advocates of the contemplative life, whether philosophical or religious, who hold that human happiness is to be found strictly in meditative stillness...

...Pascal is right to a significant degree...

...The very best writings in this collection, and most notably those by Johnson, King-lake, and James, record with art's main force the tests to which these "traveling souls," in Whitman's phrase, submitted their deepest speculations, along the landscape and amid the tumultuous cities...

...Even the more worthy ecstasies of James and Lawrence had a certain peevish weakness behind them: to be capable ofhappiness only in this place or that one, sufficiently civilized or sufficiently uncivilized for one's taste, is to admit oneself to be lacking just as surely as the sorry hometown one has fled...

...A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither," D. H. Lawrence declared, perennially footloose but always on the lookout for some place worth staying...

...Evelyn Waugh gets stuck in a fetid little jungle outpost in British Guiana for an awfully long time...

...if he's not so lucky, he'll have to do some groping around and gasping for breath before he finds the peculiar atmosphere that he can drink in easily, joyously...

...For that matter, and more important, most of the things that just about any tourist has done by now can still be done as though for the first time...

...I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys," writes the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, "when it was still possible to see the full splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted, and spoilt . . . " Blight and spoilage there are in abundance, of course, yet they have notdone in the world's splendor quite yet, nor put an end to real journeying...

...Robert Louis Stevenson details the perils of travel by donkey...

...Mark Twain sneaks off a cruise ship under quarantine and leads a midnight raiding party against the Parthenon...

...The selections in The Norton Book of Travel—from the work of some fifty writers, including poetry, fiction, history, and letters, as well as travel writing strictly construed—abundantly illustrate the world's variety, both in the things that exist to be known and told of and in the sorts of men who set out to know and tell of them...

...W. Norton/$19.95 Algis Valiunas 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 Tobias Smollett catalogues exhaustively the assorted human refuse—gougers, chiselers, fleecers, bamboozlers, pimps, whores, cutthroats, and syphilitic opera singers—that chokes the path of any man unfortunate enough to venture upon the traveling life, especially in France...

...Travel worthy of the name is virtually extinct, Mr...

...Perfect stillness—that of a man who has all he needs inside himself—might be the highest form of human reverence and the source of the surest happiness...

...For Pascal, even the mustiest corner of the world is radiant with the divine presence, and Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Chicago...

...Henry James, as the Roman Carnival roars all around him, happens upon a young priest praying alone in a little church, and his reflections on the sight tremble between distaste for the chilling grimness of Christianity and tender regard for the unassailable purity of the priest's devotion...

...Pedro Vas de Caminha does seminal field work in physical anthropology, comparing the pudenda of native Brazilian women with their Portuguese counterparts...

...it is within the traveler's power to wipe the greasy thumbprint from the postcard views...

...There remain places hard to get at and perhaps harder to get out of, where you are unlikely to find a McDonald's or bump into anyone you know: you can still take a dog-sled to the North Pole, or search for living dinosaurs in the swamps of central Africa, or dress yourself as an Afghan tribesman and accompany the mujahedeen into combat...

...Charles Dickens, treading warily in Washington, D.C., for everyone there chews tobacco and no one is very particular about where he spits, pronounces America to be the land of great expectorations...

...To such a man, his own room is precisely what a steel crate bound with chains and dumped in the river was to Houdini: something to be gotten out of in a hurry, before he suffocates...

...what is most wanting in our sad time is the human capacity to be inspired...

...there is really only tourism now, which "requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way...

...Alexander Kinglake, disregarding all warnings, enters Cairo in time of plague...

...EEven as The Norton Book of Travel celebrates the world's sunlit vastness and honors the daring men who've explored it, Paul Fussell, the anthology's editor, nevertheless cautions that the world is not what it used to be and that nowadays one might be advised to stay home and read...

...The sterling quality of intelligence and of sentiment in The Norton Book of Travel, onthe part not only of writers obviously at home in the world but also of some hanging by their fingertips from the narrowest cracks in a spiritual cliff-face, demonstrates that travel, too, can be an exalted calling...

...There is wonder and there is wonder...

...To see things clearly and with wonder when you are a tourist is not easy, but it is no more difficult than to do so when you are at home in your room...

...Having lighted on the right whither—though right only for the time being—Lawrence let loose a whooping hallelujah as he shipped out for Sardinia: "Ah, God, liberty, liberty, elemental liberty...