1) Travel allows one to stop acting like a new person and to start becoming one The unfamiliarity of travel jolts you out of your familiar patterns. Who we are on the road is different from who we are at home. I don’t know if who we are on the road is closer to our…
1) Genre stories help us escape the narratives of our humdrum lives Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win…
1) On what travel can reveal about the way we live If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest — in all its ardor and paradoxes — than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might…
By Robert D. Kaplan Originally published in the January 2006 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (an excerpt) Knowing the future is easy, if only we were willing to see the present. In the 1980s, it was one thing to learn about Afghanistan through fleeting and sporadic news reports; it was another to watch with a…
1) On the way empathy requires inquiry and openness Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.” 2) On the…
“The time-honored tradition of the flâneur is when the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it.” –Will Self, interviewed in World Hum “He (or she) is not a foreign tourist eagerly tracing down the Major Sights and ticking them off a list of…
(an excerpt) Why is so much travel writing so boring? Why on Monday morning do people talk about an op-ed piece they read in the Sunday paper, or a sports column, or a magazine essay, or a feature profile, but rarely a travel story? Why do the travel magazines, lavish with tips and sumptuous photographs,…
1) On the ubiquity of beauty Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. 2) On the uses of simplicity It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if…
(an excerpt) We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches…
1) On the intrinsic human urge to travel The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown, the bear…
By Larry Habegger (an excerpt) The best travel stories are really stories about life, with lessons for the writer and reader about ourselves and the people and places in our still magical world. We don’t have to travel far to explore both the outer and inner worlds. Some of us love to roam the world,…
