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Paul Theroux

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The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road Kindle Edition

by Paul Theroux (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

196 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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The acclaimed author explores the greatest travel writing by literary adventurers from Freya Stark and James Baldwin to Nabokov and Hemmingway.

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe with this meditative journey through the books that shaped him as a reader and 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 Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected, including J.R.R. Tolkien, Samuel Johnson, Eudora Welty, Evelyn Waugh, Isak Dinesen, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Pico Iyer, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Bruce Chatwin, John McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Graham Greene, Paul Bowles, and many more.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Travel maestro Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar) conducts a rambling tour of the genre in this diverting meditation on passages from his own and other writers' works. Several chapters spotlight underappreciated travel writers from Samuel Johnson to Paul Bowles, while others explore themes both profound and whimsical. There are classic set-piece literary evocations, including Thoreau on the hush of the Maine woods and Henry James on the miserable pleasures of Venice. A section on storied but disappointing destinations fingers Tahiti as "a mildewed island of surly colonials"; travel epics—shipwrecks, Sahara crossings, Jon Krakauer's duel with Mount Everest—are celebrated; exotic meals are recalled (beetles, monkey eyes, and human flesh, anyone?); and some writers, like Emily Dickinson, just stay home and write about that. The weakest section is a compendium of aphoristic abstractions—"Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion"—while the strongest pieces descry a tangible place through a discerning eye and pungent sensibility: "I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset," Evelyn Waugh rhapsodizes; "othing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting." Photos. (May 26)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Review

A "determinedly personal collection of travel appreciation."
-Kirkus Reviews

A "diverting meditation on passages from his own and other writers' works. [T]he strongest pieces descry a tangible place through a discerning eye and pungent sensibility..."
-Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover

Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that shaped him as a reader and traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel contains excerpts from the best of Theroux s own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected: Vladimir Nabokov Eudora Welty Evelyn Waugh James Baldwin Charles Dickens Pico Iyer Henry David Thoreau Anton Chekhov Mark Twain John McPhee Freya Stark Ernest Hemingway Graham Greene and many others PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books, including Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

About the Author

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 Cape Cod.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Travel in Brief

The Necessity to Move

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
— D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia(1921)

Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is “Outsickness.” When the snow melts, the stork arrives, and the first steamships race off, then I feel the painful travel unrest.
— Hans Christian Andersen, letter, 1856, quoted in Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen(2005)

The Road Is Life

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road(1958)

But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking along the road; the perspective, to say the least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with the absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
— James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain(1953)

You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back.
— DARK STAR SAFARI

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in many respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or shopping for food, or paying bills.
— THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with existence or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience.
— FRESH AIR FIEND

The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. And in the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or ageless, time stands still.
— SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS

It is sometimes the way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.
— GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten.
— FRESH AIR FIEND

Because travel is often a sad and partly masochistic pleasure, the arrival in obscure and picturesquely awful places is one of the delights of the traveler.
— THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

In travel, as in many other experiences in life, once is usually enough.
— THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

In travel you meet people who try to lay hold of you, who take charge like parents, and criticize. Another of travel’s pleasures was turning your back on them and leaving and never having to explain.
— THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA

Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts.
— THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR

All travel is circular . . . After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man’s way of heading home.
— THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell.
— THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA

No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere.
— THE PILLARS OF HERCULES

It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home — indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
— FRESH AIR FIEND

When strangers asked me where I was going I often replied, “Nowhere.” Vagueness can become a habit, and travel a form of idleness.
— THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS

Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.
— GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

One of the happier and more helpful delusions of travel is that one is on a quest.
— GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR

I had gotten to Lower Egypt and was heading south in my usual traveling mood — hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable, for although happiness is desirable it is a banal subject for travel; therefore, Africa seemed a perfect place for a long journey.
— DARK STAR SAFARI

Invention in travel accords with Jorge Luis Borges’s view, floated beautifully through his poem “Happiness” (La Dicha), that in our encounters with the world, “everything happens for the first time.” Just as “whoever embraces a woman is Adam,” and “whoever lights a match in the dark is inventing fire,” anyone’s first view of the Sphinx sees it new: “In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, which has just been sculpted . . . Everything happens for the first time but in a way that is eternal.”
— DARK STAR SAFARI

Traveling is one of the saddest pleasures of life.
— Madame de Staël, Corinne, ou l’Italie(1807)

Two Paradoxes of Travel

It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind. With Americans, it is a national trait, as native to us as the rollercoaster or the jukebox. It is no simple longing for the hometown or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.
— Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans,” Vogue (1940)

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one’s own inner life of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature(1982)

From the Hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00AD9YJIM
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books; First edition (May 19, 2011)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 19, 2011
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 9.3 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #202,755 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #8 in Literary Travel
- #32 in Quotation Reference
- #64 in Literary & Religious Travel Guides

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196 ratings

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Paul Theroux

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Paul Theroux was born and educated in the United States. After graduating from university in 1963, he travelled first to Italy and then to Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps teacher at a bush school in Malawi, and as a lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda. In 1968 he joined the University of Singapore and taught in the Department of English for three years. Throughout this time he was publishing short stories and journalism, and wrote a number of novels. Among these were Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play and Jungle Lovers, all of which appear in one volume, On the Edge of the Great Rift (Penguin, 1996).

In the early 1970s Paul Theroux moved with his wife and two children to Dorset, where he wrote Saint Jack, and then on to London. He was a resident in Britain for a total of seventeen years. In this time he wrote a dozen volumes of highly praised fiction and a number of successful travel books, from which a selection of writings were taken to compile his book Travelling the World (Penguin, 1992). Paul Theroux has now returned to the United States, but he continues to travel widely.

Paul Theroux's many books include Picture Palace, which won the 1978 Whitbread Literary Award; The Mosquito Coast, which was the 1981 Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and joint winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was also made into a feature film; Riding the Iron Rooster, which won the 1988 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; The Pillars of Hercules, shortlisted for the 1996 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; My Other Life: A Novel, Kowloon Tong, Sir Vidia's Shadow, Fresh-air Fiend and Hotel Honolulu. Blindness is his latest novel. Most of his books are published by Penguin.

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Customers appreciate Theroux's writing style in this travel book, describing it as a gem for lovers of great writers. Moreover, the book receives positive feedback for its travel value, with one customer noting it's perfect for both work and pleasure trips. Additionally, customers find it inspiring, with one review highlighting its combination of contemplation and imagination. The book's design and leather content receive praise, with one customer specifically mentioning the beautiful leather binding. However, customers express dissatisfaction with the word count, noting there are too many quotes, and with the sticker quality, describing it as looking pretty bad.

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24 customers mention "Writing style"24 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the writing style of the book, describing it as a gem for lovers of great writers, with one customer noting how it describes techniques of other authors.

"...some other writers to include, but I thought the book did what good travel writing should do: introduce new places and new perspectives...." Read more

"...And how places change with time. A great resource." Read more

"...There are several interesting parts of the book but one that stands out that relates to bridging of the gap between the past – the time spent..." Read more

"...This is a compilation of Theroux's writing and text quoted from a wide variety of authors I would not have encountered on my own...." Read more

13 customers mention "Travel value"13 positive0 negative

Customers find this book to be a great travel guide, with one customer noting it provides a complete discussion of the travel experience, while another mentions it serves as a perfect accompaniment to a traveler's library.

"...The book is perfect for a trip for work or pleasure--the chapters are brief and the quotes and annotations are brief...." Read more

"As a well renowned traveler and writer that explored the world Author Paul Theroux shares those experiences with readers in “The Tao of Travel:..." Read more

"...travelogues, but more as a review of his general thoughts and theories of travel, thematically tied together through excerpts from his and other's..." Read more

"...Israel to Indonesia to Scotland to Paris and found this a wonderful traveling companion...." Read more

5 customers mention "Inspiration"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book inspirational, with one mentioning its combination of contemplation and imagination, while another notes how it introduces new places.

"...but I thought the book did what good travel writing should do: introduce new places and new perspectives...." Read more

"A very different perspective thru many, many eyes. Interesting ideas and experiences mixed with different cultures. And how places change with time...." Read more

"...Theroux makes and interesting point, “to travel in ignorance of a region’s history leaves you unable to understand the “why" of anything or anyone…..." Read more

"...THE TAO OF TRAVEL is a great historical and philosophical review of the opinions of the great travelers of the past as well as the present..." Read more

4 customers mention "Design"4 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the design of the book, finding it pretty beautiful, with one customer noting how it harmonizes with the landscape.

"...It is unfortunate. The book is bound with decent looking red, textured leather...." Read more

"...By the way, the book (object) is pretty beautiful. A good gift to offer for those who love to travel but do not enjoy to read so much." Read more

"All Theroux books are incredible. This book takes the cake with its design, binding and content. Please, if you love travel, read this." Read more

"In harmony with the landscape..." Read more

3 customers mention "Leather content"3 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's leather content, with one mentioning its beautiful binding.

"...It is unfortunate. The book is bound with decent looking red, textured leather...." Read more

"Love the book with the beautiful leather binding...but why in the world did you stick a huge lable on the back of the book, including the price...." Read more

"...Although the cover is faux leather with a nice marker band attached, removing the label one small shred at a time pretty well chewed up the back of..." Read more

5 customers mention "Word count"0 positive5 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the word count in the book, with several noting there are too many quotes.

"...precious--beware of anyone who appropriates the word Tao--and too many quotes from his own previous travel books. And somehow I was just bored...." Read more

"This is a loose collection of a lot of quotations from a wide variety of people regarding their reflections on their travel experiences...." Read more

"it's far too much a mish-mash of comments and short takes on travel. . some gems, but with nothing near the depth of his earlier books. . ...." Read more

"..."wordy" and the works are realy for reference...and the words are not his. Good reference material tho'." Read more

3 customers mention "Sticker quality"0 positive3 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the stickers on the book, with several noting that they look pretty bad.

"...more or less rides along the top of the textured leather and looks pretty bad. I removed it immediately...." Read more

"...is such a nice book to give as a gift, but getting that ugly huge sticker off the back, which takes up almost the entire back of the book, took a..." Read more

"...A bit dry, but still good. Only issue I had was the GIANT sticker on the back. I peeled it off and it took some of the red coloring off with it...." Read more

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Richard A. Jenkins
A pleasant traveling companion
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2011
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I've been a fan of Theroux's for years. I've managed to read almost all of his frankly uneven fiction; his incisive but rather petty, if deserved, skewering of V.S. Naipaul; and, of course, his many travel narratives. I've enjoyed even his less loved narratives like his wickedly funny lampoon of England. I read "Tao" on a work trip that included a quick but pleasurable side trip to Theroux's sometime home of Cape Cod, so it seemed very apropos, especially given the inclusion of rail, boat, and air travel (plus a lot of walking). I must have read different reviews from others, because I bought and read this knowing that it was a collection of quotes from Theroux and an annotated cast of others. I could have done without the large sticker on the leather binding and could have suggested some other writers to include, but I thought the book did what good travel writing should do: introduce new places and new perspectives. The book also introduced me to writers I had not read in the past, but whom I plan to read in the future. I can think of few less well known writers he could have added like the pioneering Leila Hadley (her life ended in scandal, but so did the lives of several males he included) or Bob Manry (the father of a high school classmate who sailed the Atlantic in a small boat and had other adventures while holding a relatively normal job and living in a typical post-WWII suburb). Those are minor quibbles, though. The book is perfect for a trip for work or pleasure--the chapters are brief and the quotes and annotations are brief. The content ranges from the wistful to the profound to the gossipy. A large attention span is not needed, but some appreciation of travel (as opposed to tourism or trips that have to meet some desperately sought objective) is. As Theroux notes, some of the best travel writing has come from people who rarely left their arm chair, so a long list of countries visited is not a requirement.

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R. W. Nilsson
Another great travel book.
Reviewed in the United States on March 2, 2025
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A very different perspective thru many, many eyes. Interesting ideas and experiences mixed with different cultures. And how places change with time. A great resource.

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William J. Fickling
What a marvelous book! Is this Theroux's swan song?
Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2011
Verified Purchase
Like many of the previous reviewers, I have read many of Theroux's previous travel books, have enjoyed all of them, and have learned something from each of them. Therefore it was with considerable anticipation that I ordered and read this book. I knew before I read it that it would be a compendium or compilation of travel musings from Theroux and others, and I was not sure whether I would enjoy it. I am happy to say that I enjoyed the book thoroughly and that it quite exceeded my expectations.

It is true that there is very little that is original in this book. So what? What is there is marvelous, and even though Theroux quotes from himself a good bit, it is also quite true that it is highly unlikely that I would ever have come across most of the reflections on travel by other authors that Theroux includes here. That alone makes this book a gem. For example, here is this pearl from Hans Christian Andersen, right on page 1: "Homesickness is a feeling that many know and suffer from; I on the other hand feel a pain less known, and its name is 'Outsickness.'" Is there any true traveler with whom that quote won't resonate? I am very much like Theroux in that, like him, I have felt a wanderlust, and urge to travel, at least from childhood or early adolescence, and it is exactly that wanderlust that Andersen is referring to when he mentions "Outsickness." For me the urge to travel began when I read Richard Halliburton's books as a teenager, and I was happy to see that Theroux mentions and quotes from Halliburton here. This is especially gratifying because, although Halliburton is remembered and revered by people of a certain age, he is almost forgotten today.

Theroux does not shrink from differentiating between travelers and tourists. I had to chuckle at one of Theroux's own comments: "Choose your country, use guidebooks to identify the areas most frequented by foreigners--and then go in the opposite direction." This is very similar to something I have always said to acquaintances that I consider serious travelers--if, when you tell people where you are going and their response is "what the hell do you want to go THERE for?"--then you know you're going to the right place. Theroux also mentions other essentials of travel if it is truly going to be the learning experience or epiphany that you want it to be: travel alone, don't overplan, and above all, leave your electronic equipment at home.

This book is unlike anything that Theroux has written before in that it seems to be a distillation of everything essential to be said about travel--hence, I suppose, the title. But it also caused me to wonder, given that Theroux recently turned seventy: is this Theroux's swan song? Is this his goodbye to travel writing? Is this his way of saying "that's all there is; there is no more?" Will we be seeing any more travel books from Paul Theroux? If that is indeed the case, then this book is a very worthy ending to an illustrious career. If you love travel, and if you haven't done so already, I urge you to buy a copy posthaste.

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Braddan
Very Dissapointing
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 24, 2012
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The combination of the title, format and author combined to tempt me to this purchase.

Sadly I wish I had saved the money.

Rather than being the interesting collection of witty excerpts cleverly compiled and interlinked with insightful commentary that I had anticipated it is simply a dull catalog of travel drivel that as far as I could tell had no emotional commitment from Mr PT. If pushed i would suggest one or more editors simply pulled a bunch of acclaimed travel writers literature together, threw darts to select paragraphs and the passed to Mr PT to approve, which he sadly did.

The only book I have not finished :(

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Deborah, artist
When a reference book is also a treat to browse
Reviewed in France on July 21, 2013
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It's true, The Tao of Travel is more than anything else a collection of quotes about travel from books by Paul Theroux's favorite writers. And his very favorite writer is himself! It's only Tao in the title... However, even as a reference book, it's a fun read as well as a chance to discover other travel writers such as R. L. Stevenson and D. H. Lawrence, and a few behind the scenes stories. I'm now looking forward to reading Theroux's other books. The beautiful binding, maps, and quality printing make it a nice gift, or a worthwhile addition to your library.

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P. Zwatz
Das schönste Reisebuch...
Reviewed in Germany on April 11, 2016
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Eines meiner Lieblingsreisebücher.. Zu tiefst philosophisch... Sehr tiefsinnig und interessant!
Wunderschöner Einband, perfekt zum Mitnehmen!
Hab das Buch oft auf Reisen dabei...

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Daniel Marc Reicher
A classic
Reviewed in Canada on July 24, 2013
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I first borrowed this book from my local library but soon felt the quality of the content required personal possession with no time limits. The volume is beautifully bound in red leather and has good heft in the hand. Paul Theroux takes one on a wonderful, insightful tour of many authors from different epochs as they wrote about their travels - real and imagined.

A rare treat and a happy surprise for readers. Thank you, Mr. Theroux.

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Helene Fuldauer
the author
Reviewed in Canada on January 19, 2022
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I read it before. I offered it as a present to a friend.

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The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road Kindle Edition

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5.0 out of 5 stars A pleasant traveling companion

4.0 out of 5 stars Another great travel book.

5.0 out of 5 stars What a marvelous book! Is this Theroux's swan song?

Top reviews from other countries

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Dissapointing

4.0 out of 5 stars When a reference book is also a treat to browse

5.0 out of 5 stars Das schönste Reisebuch...

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic

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A pleasant traveling companion

Another great travel book.

What a marvelous book! Is this Theroux's swan song?

Very Dissapointing

When a reference book is also a treat to browse

Das schönste Reisebuch...

A classic

the author