Travels with Myself and Another

Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.

I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

Italy was about churches, Greece it's ruins; but Israel was about surviving and about feeling glad.

Since I am devoted to my own freedom, I didn’t think it just to deny other people theirs; and a basic freedom must be to be bossed by your own kind, not by foreigners.

Endurance was the Chinese secret weapon. The Japanese should have understood that, and everybody else had better remember it.

I felt both puny and pretentious, trying to write in the grandeur of that natural world where everything was older than time and I was the briefest object in the landscape.

The latrine broke my lion heart.

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.

The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share. One of the three greatest joys in life is swimming naked in clean tropical sea. We need a root of personal experience from which to grow our understanding. Each new experience plants another root; the smallest root will serve. The lethargy of compounded discomfort and boredom is the trademark of the genuine horror journey. That state of grace which can rightly be called happiness, when body and mind rejoice together. This occurs, as a divine surprise, in travel; this is why I will never finish traveling. Loving is a habit like another and requires something nearby for daily practice. I loved the cat, the cat appeared to love me. As for me, the name Surinam was enough. I had to see a place with a name like that. Stinking with rancid coconut butter, the local Elizabeth Arden skin cream. You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. Bali- a museum island, boringly exquisite, filled with poor beautiful people being stared at by rich beautiful people. No sight is better calculated to turn anyone off travel than the departure lounge of a big airport.

Trays crashed off our laps, bottles spilled; the ship proceeded with the motion of a dolphin, lovely in a dolphin and vile in a ship.

Impatience leading swiftly to boredom is my vice, not panic.

The white hunter was laughing happily, his adoring girl was open-mouthed in admiration for his nerve, I was sweating with dismay and outrage, and then an elephant charged and did not stop and our hero stepped hard on the gas and drove off, saying, “Not bluffing that time.” So now I knew, lucky me, what a medium-size elephant stampede was like. Doomed to see elephants in the company of lunatics. All I wanted was to watch them with love and respect, at a reasonable distance.

This was not the velvet embracing desert sky at El Geneina; this was infinite space. The idea of no boundaries, no end, is terrifying in the abstract and much worse if you are looking at it. The far-off stars were an icy crust; the darkness beyond the stars was more than I could handle. The machinery that keeps me going is not geared to cope with infinity and eternity as so clearly displayed in that sky.

Slowly we wound uphill past fields and thick forest until we reached the eastern edge of the Rift Valley. Far below, as far as I could see, lay the golden plain ringed by blue mountains. It was true, it was there, and more magical than I had ever pictured it.

Here one has the perfect example of justice: the men have kept their women enslaved—the Arabs more than the Christian Copts—kept them stupid and limited and apart, for their male vanity and power; result: the dull women bore the daylights out of the men.

It is high time that I learn to be more careful about hope, a reckless emotion for travellers. The sensible approach would be to expect the worst, the very worst; that way you avoid grievous disappointment and who knows, with a tiny bit of luck, you might even have a moderately pleasant surprise, like the difference between hell and purgatory.

Always delighted to grab any privileges I can get, I don’t like the sense of being privileged by law.