jumping to conclusions (1)

On the eve of another trip, the first of a series planned for this month, I find myself re-reading Theroux - and agreeing with him all the way:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Muncheausen syndrome.

Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? . . .

Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 1.