1) Reading stories is an act of imagination for the reader Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence, authors trick readers into doing most of the imaginative work. Reading is often seen as a passive act: we lie back and let writers pipe joy into our brains. But this is wrong. When we experience a story,…
By Irvin S. Cobb I. From time to time, as I stated in a preceding booklet of this series, it is customary for Bill Al White to strum his typewriter and burst into rhapsody on the merits of his State. “I shall sing a few stanzas A-touchin’ on Kansas,” he cries, or ringing words to…
Pico Iyer has published 15 books, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. At the same time he has been…
Human beings are more alike than unlike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure. It is necessary, especially for Americans, to see other lands and experience other cultures. The American, living in this vast country…
(an excerpt) Why is travel so exciting? Partly because it triggers the thrill of escape, from the constriction of the daily, the job, the boss, the parents. ‘A great part of the pleasure of travel,’ says Freud, ‘lies in the fulfillment of . . . early wishes to escape the family and especially the father.’…
Has anyone ever considered the philosophy of travel? It might be worth while. What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Moreover locomotion- the privilege of animals- is perhaps the key to intelligence. The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the…
By Rolf Potts Most any journey can, at moments, have a way of making a traveler feel like he’s navigating a blurred line between present and past. Walk through the urban slums at the outskirts of modern Mumbai, and you can get a sense for what New York’s Lower East Side might have felt like…
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed…
(an excerpt) Some people have asked, “Why does it matter to me in Chicago if some tribe in Africa disappears?” My answer is that it probably doesn’t matter to you at all in Chicago if a tribe in Africa disappears. And what does it matter to a tribe in Africa if Chicago disappears? Again, not…
1) On the twenty-year gap in generational nostalgia In the seventies, people lived the fifties, reminiscing over the preordained conclusion that it had been a better time to be alive (Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley on TV, American Graffiti and Grease in movie houses). In the eighties, people fixated on the sixties, and particularly…
1) On the joys of traveling in the United States To really see America, you need to drive it mile by mile, because you not only begin to grasp the immensity of this beautiful country, you see the climate and geography change with every state line. These are indeed things that cannot be learned from…
