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…
Pascal once wrote that all mankind’s misfortunes spring from just one cause: ‘he does not know how to sit still in a room.’ I like that: it makes me less ashamed to admit that I am a poor traveler. Places interest me, but more and more often the mechanics of getting to them defeats me,…
Blaise Pascal, the 17th century French genius who blessed the world by inventing the hypodermic syringe and the calculating machine (if such things can be counted blessings) took a singular view of man’s liking for travel. It was an ironic view, considering that he also invented the world’s first public bus service: for so far…
1) Vacations as we know them began in the mid-twentieth century Long enjoyed by the leisure class, vacationing was an unknown practice to most Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet by midcentury, paid leave periods, carved out for the explicit purpose of giving individuals the chance to get away for a while,…
(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, November 1967) One warm summer day I was standing on a beach near Tom Never’s Head on Nantucket. Children were splashing around in the gentle surf as their mothers lay gabbing by the Styrofoam ice chests and the Scotch Grills. About thirty yards from shore, a man paddled back and…
The World samples a half-century, peripatetically. It selects its subjects as it goes along. Its title may perhaps imply a more considered and objective collection, the sort of memoir in which a philosophically minded novelist might reflect upon his times, or a retired columnist from a quality broadsheet. Do not be deceived. This portfolio of…
The following is an excerpt from an interview with Asher Ross for an upcoming book from Kinfolk on souvenirs. What thoughts do you have on bringing home souvenirs for friends and family? If seeking to preserve an ephemeral experience in an object is often hopeless, even for ourselves, what does it mean to try to…
(An excerpt) Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or…
