"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 »
Paper is soft and ink is fluid; it might be better if some pages of this chronicle could be written on chips of granite at the poi...nt of steel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... it is only after years and years that you can speak of penury in the midst of opulence, of hunger in the midst of almost sinfu...l plenty. You must never speak of the immediate experience unless and until you have learned its consequent value. Otherwise you grow old in bitterness which is barren and futile....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four, b...esides being very amusing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses a...re womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a st...urgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist--a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimi...st--only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »