"The age of independent travel is drawing to an end," said E.M. Forster back in 1920, when it had been increasingly clear for deca...des that the mass production inevitable in the late industrial age had generated its own travel-spawn, tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood. If travel is mysterious, even miraculous, and often lonely and frightening, tourism is commonsensical, utilitarian, safe, and social, "that gregarious passion," the traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor calls it, "which destroys the object of its love." Not self-directed but externally enticed, as a tourist you go not where your own curiosity beckons but where the industry decrees you shall go. Tourism soothes, shielding you from the shocks of novelty and menace, confirming your prior view of the world rather than shaking it up. It obliges you not just to behold conventional things but to behold them in the approved conventional way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before.... The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and ...the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry... O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like vinegar on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the hu...man heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases. As charcoal is to hot embers and wood to f...ire, so is a quarrelsome person for kindling strife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens. As an apple tree among the tr...ees of the wood, so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »