The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road BY Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) From the Publisher: “Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates ‘The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags’ and exposes ‘Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited’; tracks extreme journeys in ‘Travel as an Ordeal’ and highlights some of ‘Travelers’ Favorite Places.’ Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected.”

If the thought of a leisurely rail journey has lost its luster, so has the appeal of a commonplace book. For many centuries, readers kept them as a repository of quotations, interesting facts, reflections on topics of personal interest. In “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet,” Jonathan Swift recommended keeping a “record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation… not only your own original thoughts… but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.” The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road by Paul Theroux is clearly a commonplace book of travel and travel writing by a deeply reflective thinker, making such words into his own. If the genre can be acknowledged as providing a meaningful intellectual and moral portrait of its author, rather than being merely an anthology of interesting quotations, various complaints about the book — that it is too much “Theroux,” it is uneven — vanish. The book succeeds then as its admirers claim. Theroux suggests his book is a good vade-mecum for contemporary travelers, but only for those who share the premise that travel can be a useful metaphor for life. And that’s travel, not tourism or vacationing… A prolific author and well-known personality, Theroux is often described as “grumpy.” In these pages, he revels in others’ idiosyncrasies and even duplicity, frequently choosing outrageous stories and perspectives, but his own grumpiness seems more intransigence of perspective, generously and energetically brought to bear on a topic, dear to his heart. In other words, not grumpy, but singular. Quoting from his own Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), he writes: “Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life” (p. 9). In keeping with its decorous subject, The Tao of Travel is handsome: brown bonded leather with gold lettering, flexible with a sewn-in elastic place-marker, a near facsimile of what might be found in the hands of a passenger enjoying a great rail journey from the past. Theroux suggests his book is a good vade-mecum for contemporary travelers, but only for those who share the premise that travel can be a useful metaphor for life. And that’s travel, not tourism or vacationing, a distinction he is quick to make. The 285-page book is elaborately organized with a preface, twenty-seven chapters on various quirky, but interesting topics (“The Pleasures of Railways;” “Travelers on Their Own Books;” “Travelers Who Never Went Alone;” “English Travelers on Escaping England;” “Everything Is Edible Somewhere;” “Perverse Pleasures of the Inhospitable;” “Evocative Name, Disappointing Place;” “Dangerous, Happy, Alluring”). These miscellanies are then interspersed with extended excerpts of “Travel Wisdom” from eight authors, including Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Sir Francis Galton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Freya Stark (a welcome woman!), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Evelyn Waugh, and Paul Bowles. The chapters consist of lists, summaries, commentary, a delightful mixture of formats to accompany the widely ranging sources. It never gets repetitive. There is also an index of people and places, useful because Theroux’ favorite authors often show up in multiple chapters. Many of the authors referenced were new to me, making the book more a starting point for interesting perspectives in travel literature than a final word.

Readers will have their own favorite chapters, based on their own starting points. Being somewhat of a reluctant traveler myself, I especially enjoyed the chapter in which Theroux summarizes “notable sojourns from the longest to the shortest.” These include Sir John Mandeville’s thirty-four years of wandering in the fourteenth century; Stephen Crane’s day and a half in “The Open Boat” off the Florida coast; and Kipling’s stay in Mandalay, which was non-existent, resulting in what Theroux calls “obvious howlers” in the poem of that name. In another favorite, “Fear, Neuroses and Other Conditions,” Theroux tells of Richard Henry Dana who took a sea journey resulting in Two Years Before the Mast because poor eyesight prevented him from attending Harvard. And then there is Geoffrey Moorhouse who tried to treat his agoraphobia by crossing the Sahara Desert from west to east.

Theroux claims that “the nontraveler seems to me to exist in suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato” (p. 158). But in his “Staying Home” chapter, he expresses true regard, not contempt, for writers on a narrow-ranging path: Thoreau, Fielding, Emily Dickinson, Xavier de Maistre and my favorite, the twelfth century Japanese artistocrat Kamo-no-Chōmei who lived in a hut ten feet square by seven feet high. Perhaps in the end, Theroux’ deepest respect is reserved for the writer, rather than any mere adventurer. As he quotes from David Livingstone, “it is far easier to travel than to write about it” (p. 49).

Just as a journey is more than a compilation of events, a true commonplace book is more than the sum of its parts. To my mind, The Tao of Travel meets this condition because of the forthright nature of the selections and the generous personal commentary.

Several chapters examine travel as it appears in literature, not just literature of travel. In “Classics of a Sense of Place,” Theroux makes his personal recommendations of books providing “an intense experience of a particular place” (p. 238), including Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, Italian Hours by Henry James, and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. There is a chapter on “Imaginary Journeys,” often “elaborate fictions created by writers who have ranged widely” (p. 171), including Samuel Butler, Miguel de Unamuno, and Italo Calvino.

Another chapter deals with “Writers and the Places They Never Visited.” Theroux has no patience with a species of writer who “is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to those travelers who actually troubled to go there” (p. 213). Saul Bellow comes in for the greatest attack; Henderson the Rain King, Theroux claims is Bellow’s “weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure” (p. 226). Such strongly worded opinions would have no place in a typical anthology; here, they heighten interest, much as ordeal, seen later, does to travel.

The chapter on walking and its often spiritual substratum was particularly delightful to me. Xuanzang walked alone for seventeen years in the seventh century, collecting Buddhist manuscripts. In the seventeenth century, poet Matsuo Bashō walked nine months, seeking enlightenment. Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Muir, Peter Matthieson: all walkers, but my romantic favorite is Werner Herzog, walking five hundred miles from Munich to Paris, certain that Lotte Eisner on her deathbed, would survive until his arrival. The resulting book, Of Walking in Ice, is now on my list to read.

The chapter “Travel as an Ordeal” collects those journeys of greatest interest to Theroux, who believes that an ordeal “tests the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength” (p. 108). These edge phenomena trigger “instances of near madness, hallucinatory episodes, weird fugues, and near-death experiences.” As Theroux also acknowledges, such experiences “bring out the wit in a traveler.” That some element of ordeal is present in most great travel books helps us “begin to understand the person traveling, the real nature of the writer of the book, tested to his or her limit” (p. 109). On my list for further reading from this chapter is Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His name had appeared in an earlier chapter: the man with extreme myopia and clinical depression who nevertheless went to Antartica for two years.

The chapter “Travel Feats” lists more of Theroux’ candidates for travel stardom. Italian WWII prisoner Felice Benuzzi and two others made a temporary escape from prison in order to climb Mount Kenya. They did not make it to the top, but achieved their more important goal, “to reclaim their humanity” (p. 153). Latest in this pantheon is Jessica Watson who at the age of sixteen sailed by herself around the world. She has not written a book on the adventure, but in keeping with the times, kept the world apprised of her ordeal by posting videos and updates on her blog.

In “The Things That They Carried,” we learn the quirky practical: Laurens van der Post went to Central Africa “with a stick of scarlet sealing wax in one hand and a copy of George Meredith’s Modern Love in the other” (p. 81). V. S. Naipaul required an elaborate wardrobe, including “Smedley shirts 2.” Pico Iyer carries a “Lonely Planet guide to get angry with and bitterly repudiate” (p. 84). Even more practical are “Murphy’s Rules of Travel,” a chapter presenting the distilled wisdom of this Irish “wanderer in the oldest tradition” (p. 42), as Theroux calls her. Among her other pungent recommendations, Murphy says: “Choose your country, use guidebooks to identify the areas most frequented by foreigners — and then go in the opposite direction.”

The book concludes with Theroux’ own set of travel guidelines: “Leave home; Go alone; Travel light,” ten aphorisms concluding with “Make a friend” (p. 275). More striking, I think, is the previous chapter in which he lists five personal “Travel Epiphanies,” all touching upon an interpersonal moment or a quintessentially personal glimpse of mortality.

Just as a journey is more than a compilation of events, a true commonplace book is more than the sum of its parts. To my mind, The Tao of Travel meets this condition because of the forthright nature of the selections and the generous personal commentary. Theroux never hides nor does he feel obliged to tip his hat to any author or to be “correct” in his assessments. “All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting,” he quotes himself (p. 9), and he’d probably extend that to “and if you can’t visit them, the next best thing is to read what I’ve written about visiting them.” Fine with me. The Tao of Travel as presented by Paul Theroux is an ideal lens through which to consider travel as a metaphor for living.