Our Heroine, Madame Tutli-Putli As The Old Patagonian Express comes to a close, and our guide Paul Theroux reaches his destination of Patagonia, he begins to think about the nature of his travel, and the fear and anxiety inherent to it. "There are many satisfactions in solitary travel, but there are just as many fears, " he writes on page 394. "The worst is the most constant: it is the fear of death."

New Yorkers are straphangers by nature, and we have our commuter rails and access to Amtrak. We often travel by rail alone, but this is largely routine. We can put on our iPods and pull out our books or merely get lost in our thoughts and go about our travels in a haze that's equal part hypnotic and part born of habit.

But when one travels by rail outside of this sort of routine, the isolation can be a bit more taxing. Sure, there are others around you, so you are not exactly alone. But without the crutch of routine even the most anticipated journey by an experienced traveller can present moments of anxiety - as severe as Theroux's aforementioned fear of death, or as mundane as worrying about missing your stop.

Imagine how awesome riding this Russian jet train would be!

In The Old Patagonia Express, Theroux studies the process of traveling; the act itself, rather than the modern definition of existence in a foreign place. With the reasoning that “the going is often as fascinating as the arrival,” Theroux chronicles for us the going very thoroughly. In fact, the arrival in Patagonia factors very little into the story at all.

Theroux’s sense of continuity in the book is addictive, at least for me. The idea of getting on a train and continuing on it until the end of a land mass is really, really cool. I love taking the train, even just to Prospect Park in Brooklyn, because the changing scenery is completely fascinating. When the F pulls out of the underground tunnels onto the bridge and I can look out over the buildings, the abrupt change is as strange as it is rare, as I almost never take the train to a portion of aboveground track.

Paul Theroux's "The Old Patagonian Express" is my favorite model of modern travel writing. There is something honest in its structural patterns - the train as proof that he is a traveller intent on not making it his purpose to stop to gaze and tour and relax, to not be a tourist; the narrative itself seems to move with his attention - one moment on his reading, another on overheard conversation, and another on actual engagements he has with locals and other travellers. He doesn't giddy himself in talking with people he, frankly, doesn't like. He doesn't romanticize poverty as an ideal simplicity. He is himself throughout and lends merely as frame for his narrative those things that are proof of his traveling - namely, scenery and cultural commentary.

Whenever I go home to Westport, I take Amtrak from Pennsylvania Station to Providence. I took advantage of my most recent train ride to write my own narrative. It starts at my dorm in Chinatown and ends in New Haven, Connecticut, the only stop on the stretch where the train rests long enough for me to suck down the one cig I'm afforded for the entire three-and-a-half hour ride.

why travel the world when you can drink?

Paul Theroux would probably not admit it, but there’s something about traveling by yourself that makes you want to be a different person. Alone, with no one to catch you out of character, you can play any part, put on any show for the strangers around you, and there must be something thrilling and liberating about that.

It can be monotonous, being oneself all day, every day. Some step outside of themselves by traveling, by acting, by reading a book – and some do it by drinking.

Alcohol could be said to be even more powerful then these other means, because it takes the control for you – it changes you into someone else before you even have the chance.

Whether using it to become someone else or not, Theroux certainly partakes in the age-old, time-revered custom of drinking copious amounts of alcohol. He’s fascinated by the characters in his book, The Thin Man, who seem to be drunk all the time: “I had lost the plot entirely, but the drinking still interested me. All the characters drank; they met for cocktails, they conspired in speakeasies, they talked about drinking, and they were often drunk… By midnight, I had finished The Thin Man and a bottle of tequila.”

adventures in travel

I much enjoyed Theroux’s initial discussion on what goes into writing a travel book, something we have not seen thus far in our readings. He examines this genre and what goes into conventional representations of it, versus what he plans to do with it. I recalled some of de Botton’s work as I was reading, when he talks about all the things that go unsaid in writing, travel or other. I admire Theroux’s attempt to let us in on everything that he encounters on his trip.

His writing also got me more excited to write travel narratives of my own. He describes travel writing as a chance to “tell the story of [our] experiment with space. It is the simplest sort of narrative, an explanation which is its own excuse for the gathering up and going” (3). I just love this idea of travel as “an experiment with space” and the chance we as writers have to share the results of these experiments.

Furthermore, his focus on the “How did you get there?” (4) is refreshing and unique and something I often think about myself, not just in travels but in regards to mental processes in general. It is rare to be exposed to one’s whole journey, not just the result of that journey (or perhaps reading a travel narrative is just that, reading a result?). Nevertheless, I indulge in getting to know the characters Theroux meets along his way, as opposed to only having a glimpse of his final destination.

Theroux states an awful truth in his opening pages: “…we have become used to life being a series of arrivals and departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between” (4). I so strive to avoid this reality and to pay attention to the seemingly worthless details of life. I appreciate the kind of interactions that Theroux deems important enough to include in his work, and happily take note of them myself in my daily life.

Waiting...It’s a familiar sound to anyone who travels frequently by air today. The collective groan of passengers on an outbound flight as the pilot comes on the loudspeaker and informs the cabin of yet another 20 minute delay of departure time. The frazzled-looking businessman next to you subsequently mutters a string curse words under his breath and loosens his tie. A baby starts to cry. You sigh, cross your arms and gaze quietly out the window at the lengthy line of aircraft sitting motionless on the runway.

The 21st century traveler is spoiled to an absurd degree. Gone are the beginning days of contemporary tourism, when men and women seeking to see the world had to literally risk their lives getting to their intended destinations – enduring extensive sea passages, jarring caravan routes, and the veritably dismal statistics associated with airplanes when they first began transporting people commercially. Despite the fact that airport terminals are now inundated with souvenir shops, bookstores, Brooks Brothers,’ Duty-Frees, gaggles of restaurants, and any other number of excessive creature comforts, we jet-setters act like the apocalypse is upon us when we miss our connecting flight and - gasp! - must stay overnight in the airport hotel. Oh the horror.

TOURISTS!!! I found the part with Mr. Thornberry to be extremely satisfying. “Very nice pool of water….Cocoa…..Mature trees….Berries” (209) Mr. Thornberry would say, much to Theroux chagrin. Theroux’s irritation made these passages with Mr. Thornberry particularly sweet because Mr. Thornberry was essentially a reflection of Theroux. Theroux drifts through the country on a train, drinking beers, reading books and essentially just writing what he passes by. It is true that Theroux’s writing is elegant and evocative, however, page after page of scenery, no matter how lovely, gets to be a bit frustrating to the reader (or at least this reader anyway). Similarly, Theroux is off put by the French man who identifies himself as a traveler instead of as a tourist and makes fun of him a bit. It is interesting that Theroux is harshest with those most like him, for I am sure that Theroux does not think of himself as a tourist—he is traveling on trains (which most tourists do not do) to be introduced to “the social miseries and scenic splendors of the continent” (335) and gathering material for a travel book.

Adventure!

With no knowledge of Paul Theroux, no preconceptions of the book I am about to read, and no real idea of what it is going to be about, I begin The Old Patagonian Express and am surprised by the quiet, familiar thrill the opening provides: “One of us on that sliding subway train was clearly not heading for work...It was a morning of paralyzing frost, the perfect day to leave for South America” (1).  So! I think to myself, this is going to be an adventure! And it is! for the first two pages, for after that Theroux begins thinking, he begins rationalizing and explaining.  But as we get to know our narrator, his harsh judgments, moping hours and tolerance for tequila, I find the romance and the adventure never quite leaves, but is merely shifting silently in the background.  The idea is planted before the book even begins, quotes by Stevenson and Kipling reconciling romance and the train—but it is nearly impossible, and Theroux knows this, to think of writers like Stevenson and Kipling without at least faint memories of childhood and adventure, of quests and danger and the exciting unknown.  The exclusivity and secrecy he maintains with outsiders he encounters make the mission important.  Though he becomes homesick (as all adventurers are bound to become every now and then), even the idea of home is distant, and the practicality of it is irrelevant, and a hindrance—“(my wife missed me, I told her I loved her; my children said they had made a snowman; this telephone call cost me $114)” (111), verses “The girl was desperately shy, and her drab clothes (the old woman wore a mink around her neck) and her lovely face with its sallow English sadness gave her a sort of passionate purity...I decided that the girl’s submissiveness was more than daughterly obedience: she was a servant, maintaining an anxious silence.  Her eyes were green, and I think that even that aged woman’s vanity could not have prevented her from knowing how attractive this girl was, or the true motive for my questions.  There was something Russian and old-fashioned and impenetrable about this pair” (47-48).  But when the poor green-eyed girl breaks the illusion and proves to be of the here and now, the thought of it is enough to put Theroux off: “When I saw it was a comic book, most of my ardor died: I find it discouraging to see a pretty woman reading a comic book” (57).  For the same reasons the narrator has no problem talking with Nicky as long as he is Humphrey Bogart, but when the morning comes and he is Paul Theroux once more he avoids her.  The stationary life is what bogs the explorer down, and in his own story Theroux must be, like Stevenson’s train, “the one piece of life in all the deadly land.”    

Road in Canada

Though I have never been on a train for longer than a subway ride or a trip down to Newark, I’ve been on plenty of road trips.  Since I was very young my parents would pack my family of four into our Suburan and head north or east from Los Angeles to Tahoe, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, or Wyoming.  We would be in the car for most of the day or night and I as a young child could not drive I was at the mercy of my parents when it came to where we were going and where we would stop and where we would sleep.  For much of my childhood I disliked these excursions for the most part, but as I grew older I began to enjoy the process of the traveling more and saw it as the point of the trip, rather than the destination.  A Road Trip is by definition all about the traveling.

Panamerican Travel Memories
When I realized that Theroux was actually going to write about his time on trains from Boston to Argentina, as opposed to an adventure, say, or an exploration of life in the south (though he does touch upon it at points), I was actually quite charmed. I remembered one of De Botton’s bits about trains. “A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train”(14). A fact which Theroux details for us in just the manner De Botton envisions a traveler with total honesty might. De Botton continues “A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening”(14). An opinion that I, along with the international bestselling crowds, it appears, feel that Theroux contradicts with this engaging narrative. Why isn’t it boring? Theroux is not focusing on any of De Botton’s little chapters of interest. He has no anticipation of arrival. The focus is on the travel itself, so where would the anticipation be found? He is not necessarily in search of the exotic, nor on a fact-finding mission, nor on a trip in search of beauty. It really is about the trains. Which, given their apparent discomfort, is rather impressive. I suppose his trip is closest to a feat, doing something because one can, as in the case of Mahoney. But perhaps motives aren’t important in any case.

Theroux on a train

I really like Theroux. He gets it. He’s arrogant and acts in such a manner as to place himself above every single person he encounters, but he’s being honest. So what if he’s an asshole? He’s a funny asshole. And to be fair, I can’t really blame him if his mood as depicted in his writing was off, because riding on an Amtrak train for a long distance is absolute torture. I posted about this earlier in the semester, but nothing ever goes right on these trains. They are always running late for some mysterious reason. I love Theroux’s observational humor. The funniest part so far was his bluntly stated “No, it’s not” in response to the old man’s comment about the train being like the Trans-Siberian. He just seems completely unaware of his actions.

I just think the whole premise of writing about the trip itself is great. The introduction made his point very clear. I really liked Theroux’s exchange with the raw-foodist-nondairy vegetarian. Though it was hilarious, he came of as incredibly arrogant, attempting to squander everything she was saying just because he didn’t believe it. And because she was a college student, he could easily take advantage. Aside from that, I’m really intrigued as to where this story is going to go. Theroux could be sitting around reading or sleeping but instead he actually talks to people. Even if he’s being a total asshole, as far as we know, the people he encounters are being themselves. I don’t think train travelers really put on a guise of self-importance, after all, they could potentially be flying coach or something.

I-95: The yellow brick road to sunshineUnlike many of the posters below me, I do thoroughly enjoy Theroux’s writing style for its accessibility and tangential nature. Sure, he pokes fun at his fellow travelers a bit (ok, a lot), but the only irritation with others that really stands out – aside from his illegal trafficking of kitchen utensils (which I can’t imagine he would fabricate just because it is so outlandish) – is at the expense of Wendy, the raw food girl, and Thornberry, our quintessential “tourist” that we were so recently stereotyping in class. The one thing that these two characters have in common, aside from not being as smart as Theroux, is that they are American. Sure, he has an air of superiority that sort of lingers like a fog over his entire narrative, but it certainly isn’t culturally insensitive; he just thinks he’s better than everyone.

Perhaps it is my envy for Theroux’s journey that makes me like him as much as I do. I, too, have a love for trains and their ability to allow one to view landscapes in a different way – just last Sunday, I made my friend walk forward three Amtrak cars just so that I could watch the sunset over the Hudson River from a window seat. There is something liberating about having this massive machine shuttle you through such landscapes. But the greater appeal, I think, is the idea that one can go from train to train and traverse an entire longitude line without ever having to leave the station. I often drive on my stretch of I-95 back home in Connecticut and wish I could just stay on 95-South all the way to Miami. The knowledge that I can stay on one line and end up in an entirely different climate in a matter of hours never ceases to amaze me, and Theroux takes this to a whole new level by crossing continents and hemispheres.

Paul Theroux is a raving lunatic; a prosaic space cadet; a traveler powerful enough to transcend time and space itself simply by drinking a beer and smoke some good old pipe tobacco. He is a skilled warrior of the travel world; he is an egotistical maniac, a being that can manifest meaningful relationships in the span of two pages. He is something above and beyond a writer; he is a communicator of wisdom, a beacon of knowledge spreading forth cynicism and sarcasm to the far reaches of the universe. In fact I don’t even think Theroux is traveling around the earth, the Earth is rotating around him.
Theroux turns a train ride into a sociological experiment. He makes a Buddhist granola girl inhale his dank pipe candy. He can make fun of fat people and not make you feel offended. Actually I take that back, he can point out every weird quality in any human and make you laugh hard enough that you spill a bowl of cereal on the book. I can no longer believe that neither any travel writer nor any narrative will reach take me to the level that Theroux reaches. It’s like getting high on reading.
Theroux is the reincarnation of the reincarnation of the snake in the garden of Eden. He is a painting made out of melted crayons. He is the man who influenced Albert Hoffman to create LSD> He is instant hand sanitizer; he is a student of Plato, and possibly even taught Socrates the way, although that’s debatable. Theroux actually shat on the Egyptian monuments, before Flaubert paid them visit. He was the voice that spoke to Moses at the burning bush. He spanked Rosemary Mahoney, ate George Orwell’s share of Bread, and forced the Aztecs to sacrifice humans lives in order to support Mel Gibson.

Found this while looking for more information on Paul Theroux. (The stuff being read is from his other book The Great Railway Bazaar.)

Paul Theroux makes a clear statement that he is not interested in fictionalizing his experiences. He doesn’t like the tendency of many travel writers to turn their narratives into novels. That’s what novels are for. So he declares his honesty, his attempt to record the journey from beginning to end, giving us details of his observations, interactions, and thought processes. Yet he also gives us a very clearly constructed narrative voice, and one that is not altogether pleasant.

He’s not stupid, so he must be aware of the effect of statements such as that Wendy “seemed to me profoundly loony,” with no better justification than that after listing his deeply enthralling qualities, he concludes that “I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question” (15). He is profoundly arrogant and generally unpleasant, making such comments as “I handed my newspaper to Fatty” (37). He complains that others are not interested in his fascinating person, if he does say so himself, but makes no attempt to get to know others in any real way; the interactions he does have are never sought out, and he is rude and pretentious, replying to a fellow traveler’s innocent remark that the train was like the Trans-Siberian with a sharp, conceited “No, it’s not.” He likes the dining cars more than anything else, and would prefer to interact with his books and breakfast than with other human beings. He sees himself as the best, the one who’s going furthest, the one who doesn’t want the free night at the hotel, the one who reads books he doesn’t even like because he’s so intelligent and experienced.

The most famous train in the world.

Despite knowing that this book essentially logs a long long train ride I think I still assumed that the 'story' would be buried in the rail side towns, so it was pleasantly surprising to find a reverse form to my expectations.  Initially I found the pace of the narrative a little disorientating; Boston to Cleveland – Chicago – Oklahoma – Mexico – I thought wow, wait a second, slow down, what’s the use in taking this journey if you’re not going to engage with the places along the way?  But then I suppose that would have been missing the point.  Like the lull of motion one adjusts to when actually sitting on the train I also found myself settling into the changing motion of the book, and I can appreciate the form the narrative takes.  The frantic progressive and developed America whirred by much faster than the slow chug Theroux enters into at Guatemala where the narrative slows down on account of its primitivity.  In fact reading the book very much resembles the feeling of looking out of a train window; there are points of interest, long stretches of captivating activity, and stretches that simply drag on for a little too long, simply too much of the same, and then there are stretches where one loosely engages in a romance with the scenery which often inspires you to whimsically drift off to different place with different thoughts. 

One day...El Alhambra, Spain

            “Travel is pointless without certain risks” (141).  These six words, I believe, are the most significant six words in the book thus far.    If one does not confront the unknown, take on a challenge and embrace something that is so far from one’s comfort zone, a traveler will not grow and most of all miss out on something that will probably never come their way again.  Theroux’s decision to attend the soccer match, not knowing anything of the wild and crazy outing that would soon take place, was certainly a risk worth taking. I found the soccer match, in fact to be my favorite of Theroux’s encounters.  From the intense rivalry between the Shades and the Suns in which blood spurted from noses everywhere to the outrageous discharge of floating condoms, I found myself both cringing and laughing hysterically at the same time. The event as a whole was seemingly authentic and thus appealing as Theroux let himself go and embarked on a journey that was totally spontaneous. 

Are you a glass half full or half empty kind of person?

From his writing in the first half of "The Old Patagonian Express," Paul Theroux strikes me as someone who would be a glass half empty kind of guy. Throughout the various anecdotes Theroux's focus always seems to be on the things which bother him as opposed to those which intrigue him. His short encounter with Wendy, the college student on her way to Ohio, illustrates both his underdeveloped manners and his closed minded, judgmental personality. His obvious disinterest to even consider what Wendy has to say as being something worth contemplating demonstrates a lack of tolerance to different points of views. To be honest, Theroux strikes me as one of those brooding writers who feels more comfortable at home, alone, sitting in front of a typewriter then at any sort of social event. As he accumulates interactions with what seems to me very interesting individuals, his manners become increasingly less visible. Although Theroux is in dire need of a social etiquette class, his focus on the journey instead of the destination is something to be commended.

Getting to know localsWhile he is still traveling in America, nobody on the train has been there before. Trains should be so useful. Amtrak isn’t. Thoreau is so particular about his project. He opens his travel narrative by slamming travel narratives. I can’t figure out why he did not realize it was a bit preposterous to act naturally about taking a train across America. People drive here. We own things called cars. It is almost as fabricated and artificial to take a train to Mexico as it would be to row up the Nile, in a traditional skiff.

Thoreau doesn’t avoid modesty either. Every conversation he has, before he crosses the border, is centered on the reality that everyone he talks to is dumber than he is. I hope this is not the key to wit. It actually provides a nice contrast to when he gets to Mexico, and the engineer has him trafficking in illegal silverware. I like when Thoreau is outside the joke, and I think he does as well.

Being outside the joke is one of my favorite aspects of the travel narrative. It is a situation which reaches its climax in tales of paranoia, at the heart of fear and loathing. Kafka, in a sense, is doing what Thoreau strives for. Being a stranger in a strange land is quite beautiful, especially when everyone knows everything you do not. This is where a travel narrative will always be limited. Travelers put themselves wherever they are. Kafka’s characters wake up and the inspectors are hovering over their beds. There will always be something disingenuous about a travel narrative. Especially when you’ve carefully prepared your adventure to cross the paths of dangerous inspectors.

Bad Tourist!Three things struck me while reading Theroux: 1) The tangents! Holy gravy, the tangents!!!! (more on this later) 2) I'm not sure if I've been totally sold on the "Lots-of-train-time" thing. 3) Looks like Theroux has a little Mahoney in him (or vice-versa) when it comes to the characters in this story. All right, Theroux, come clean. Do you just write whatever you're thinking? I admit I have mixed feelings about this. Sometimes it makes me giggle other times I feel genuinely lost and have no idea whats going on. There was one point where I wasnt entirely sure if Theroux was in a hotel room or a train car...actually that happened a few times. I blame Theroux's reckless writing style. One minute he's talking about the darned snow keeping him off-track, the next he's describing the importance of drinking in the novel he's reading- admittedly interesting but totally out of context. Also I'm discovering that I'm not a fan of the book reviewing he's done thus far. Granted, reading is a big part of the whole travel-as-movement experience, but he seems to slip into a duller, less animated version of himself during these periods of tangental rambling. With all that said, Theroux shows us what he's thinking which isnt always about whats going on around him- another important aspect of travel.  In terms of the book being written as a piece devoted to train travel, I'm 50/50. I adore (adore adore adore) train travel. I spent 3 months after highschool graduation criss-crossing the European continent only to discover that the majority of my memories came from the train travel and the people I met on the trains. Yet I find most of Theroux's comments and stories from his actual train experience to be pretty petty or poorly described. I wish he had done a little more with what was going on off the train tracks. And that brings me to my third point. In class we discussed the probability of Mahoney's interaction with the Egyptians being one-hundred percent factual. Seems like Theroux has a little bit of the same thing going on- and in a very irritating way.  I first took notice of this during the whole smuggling-utensils incident. The entire thing seems so unlikely that I find it semi-insulting to readers. Why wouldnt you use your language skills? Why would you risk your well-being for a stranger when it seemed as though it was a strong possibility that drugs (or worse) was being smuggled? And of coarse: why so cocky Theroux? Do you honestly believe that tourists dont get thrown into jail, fined, arrested etc... in other nations? You keep using the exscuse of being a "tourist" but I'm not sure how this protects you. Actually I find that particular element of most tourists from Western nations to be infuriating. 

Is time travel possible? “We have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between” (4). I thought that this was a very perceptive comment made by Theroux, and it kind of coincides with a lot of the discussions we have had in class, about being more concerned about getting somewhere or returning somewhere and not giving so much thought about the trip itself. The way you get somewhere is as much a trip, an experience to be remembered as the trip destination itself. Theroux continues on to talk about how we describe our travel experience, particularly plane travel. It is usually talked about in the negative, where one is happy things did not occur, like turbulence, terrorism, an annoying neighbor. The question needs to be asked, when did we become so concerned with the end result? Unfortunately, it seems that this question is equally as easy to answer: our society is a consumer-driven, money-making, results kind of society. This becomes a part of our character, whether we like it or not.

Travel JournalThe same thing surprised about The Old Patagonian Express that surprised me when I, just recently, read Theroux’s first travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar. The people he encounters and the interactions that occur seem to be out of a script or a novel, perfect anecdotes for a travel book. First there’s the ridiculously Wendy, then we have the “pfweeting” Horace, followed by the lady from Flagstaff, the Texan housewives and their children, the utensil-smuggler, and so-on. If this were my trip, these would have been people I only awkwardly stared at, imagining their stories in silence as I made my trek. Sure, who knows how many interactions it might have taken to get a few good stories, or to what degree Theroux emphasizes their eccentricities or embellishes the encounters (though he mentions in the introduction that he “can spot the fakery, the invention, the embroidery”), but he still writes in a way that keeps me turning pages.

In his introduction, Theroux writes that he wanted to “meet unusual people,” “give them life,” and to pack the book “full of faces an voices.” In that, he has succeeded. At first, I looked back at this thinking, “what luck! He’s met so many interesting/crazy/annoying/bizarre/(what have you) people.” However, now that I think about it, I have met a bunch of crazies during my travels as well, but haven’t done them justice in my stories (my friends taunt me for being the worst storyteller in the history of the world.)

Trains are great places to read Three and a half points of interest for me in reading Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express:

1. The Lake Shore Limited! I know this train route well, having taken it from New York to Toledo and back many times for school vacations. It was nice to know that the tradition of Amtrak trains running at least 4 hours behind schedule is not a new development; trains were just as slow 30 years ago. The only very clear differences I could note between the Lake Shore Limited of ’78 and’08 was the abolishment of smoking cars and a marked difference in food quality.

2. Paul Theroux likes to read while he travels. More importantly, he likes to think about what he reads in relation to the place and state of mind he is in. The actual book critiques he feels like interspersing with his narrative are kind of distracting and I wish he had cut them out, however I do appreciate that he makes a point to mention what he is reading. Lately I have realized that the location at which I read a book has a significant impact on how I think about both book and location retrospectively. It is as if being away from home (or even in a foreign state of mind in our own home) affects the context in which we read to the extent that the book picks up new significance and relevance to our lives. The last bus ride back up to school was characterized by a reading of Sartre’s The Age of Reason, whenever there was light enough to read. The novel also accompanied me to a 6th Avenue diner on a rainy night when I was feeling somewhat morose, and the scene of Mathieu and Ivich slicing their hands up in a restaurant shook me back into life. Books can be so closely tied to the place they are read that I am glad Theroux chose to mention the ones that caught his interest while traveling; I only wish he had left the criticism aside.

Who's the drama student?There’s a reason I didn’t apply to Tisch – I thought I’d fall flat in the acting world.  Drama, a younger me thought, was not my thing.  But is my love of travel any less Tischy?  I don’t see myself as an actor but as an aspiring traveler.  Unfortunately, either label may leave me waiting tables and serving coffee.