I learned who Paul Theroux was when I was in Thailand. He was an established, very successful travel writer for years, but had no idea who he was. An Australian friend/colleague mentioned some of his works, and one day at one of the nice bookstores in Bangkok I bought this particular book. As I read, I dog-eared pages and highlighted passages that resonated with me. I then put these excerpts into a WORD doc.
Nothing is truly forgotten – there is no forgetting – Freud said; there is only repression. He wrote how ‘in mental life nothing which has been formed can perish…everything is somehow preserved, and in suitable circumstances it can once more be brought to life.’
Our lives in many respects were utterly different, but on closer examination I saw how much we had in common, and how these people shared many of my hopes and fears.
There was dissatisfaction among Africans, a hankering for something better in their lives. That yearning, and that confusion, were familiar to me.
My need for external stimuli inspired in me a desire to travel. Nothing induces concentration and stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture.
I suspect that we are much more deeply conservative and threatened by novelty than we (Americans) can possibly imagine; generally speaking we don’t want to believe that we are, and we cling to a mostly mythical notion of ourselves as tolerant and liberal-minded. I think our tolerance is mostly posturing. It is unpleasant to contemplate, but this swift impulse to harass the jogger or to swamp the small-boater seems like a specifically American trait, one of our worst, arising from the pack mentality of our competitiveness, our vocal masculinity, our contempt for eccentricity, and our self-justifying humor in which the butt of the joke is always the weak victim.
I wonder whether it possible to widen the argument and make it political. So much in American foreign policy is related to implied threat or the wish to control. I think our irrational reaction to any number of countries which have chosen an unconventional path to political or economic fulfillment is an example of this envious bullying. We are always talking about freedom as though we valued it. If we truly valued it and practiced it, we would probably talk about it less often instead of treating it like a mantra in the hope of overcoming our basic instincts.
Most people who hand out advice are incapable of putting themselves in your shoes: they fear for their safety, and they impose this fear on you.
Travel also vindicated Simpson’s fair-mindedness. He believed he held ‘exceptional’ views on the subject of national character: in a word, he was not a racist, and he felt very strongly that it was politicians who whipped up feelings of nationalism and xenophobia. He said that as a child he was always told of the ‘superiority of the Scotch.” But it was all prejudice and humbug. He was not taken in: ‘I saw that each country remembered its own virtues, and saw mainly the vices of its neighbors and, by contrasting the good features of its own character with the bad of the others, reached what was to it a satisfactory conclusion.’ He was clear-sighted. He traveled around the world without any preconceived notions of who or what he would find; and this absence of cant and bigotry in his nature made him a brilliant observer.
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