You want to be a writer? First leave home.
"When people ask me what they should do to become a writer, I seldom mention books. I assume the person has a love for the written word, and solitude, and a disdain for wealth — so I say, ‘You want to be a writer? First leave home.’"
–Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend (2000)
Travel is an act of creativity
"[T]ravel for me is a kind of writing, an alternate text, a preliminary draft. It isn’t just a way to escape, as Graham Greene put it, or a way to gather material or battle against boredom. It is an act of creativity in which the world is an empty page and I’m the pen scrawling looping, recursive lines across a landscape. The goal in each case is the same — insight, joy, euphony, vivid experience, visual excitement, sensuous delight and discovery. Safer than alcohol, cheaper than heroin, it’s my method, a la Arthur Rimbaud, of systematically deranging my senses, opening myself up to the new and unexpected."
–Michael Mewshaw, "Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel" (2004)
Learn to accept change and welcome chance
"People don’t want to change unless forced to. We’ve been conditioned to structure and control our lives in order to resist change, to stop change altogether if possible, to be secure, to make rules, to make plans, to organize, to enforce, and so forth. The problem with all this is that it doesn’t work anymore. We’re de-energized and confused, afraid of the world, unsure of ourselves. Why? Because our sense of control is a complete illusion, however complex and pervasive. It doesn’t square with the world as it is, just some obsolete and chicken-shit version we made up so we could "control" it. * Vagabonding is an effective technique for trashing this illusion, one that works because it makes you feel good. You can again make your life fun instead of fucked, and you do this by paying attention to change and chance, which manifest everywhere, in all persons and places. The vagabond accepts change and welcomes chance, for they are the sure signs of energy flow, and the center of life. * Serving change and chance, which is vagabonding, automatically and unfailingly elevates you and expands your potentials so that you can meet their delightful demands."
–Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in the USA (1980)
Pico Iyer on time travel
"I’ve been lucky enough to go to many of the uncharted places on the map, and these days what I do is go more and more into the unmapped hours of the clock. I travel into 3am, I go into the dead hours of the night, I travel into silence and darkness and uncertainty, because those are places in myself that perhaps I don’t visit enough and that as a writer of discovery I feel I should explore."
–Pico Iyer, from "A New Kind of Travel for a New Kind of World", a speech given at the Key West Literary Seminar, January 5, 2006
Longfellow on the importance of the present moment
"Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!"
–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "A Psalm of Life," (1839)
Henry Miller on life as a mysterious journey
"No one takes a straight-cut line through life. Often we fail to stop at the stations indicated on the timetable. Sometimes we go off the track. Sometimes we lose our way, or take to the air and vanish life chaff. The most tremendous voyages are sometimes taken without moving from the spot. In the space of a few minutes some individuals live out of the span of an ordinary mortal’s total experience. Some use up numbers of lives in the course of their stay here below. Some burgeon like mushrooms while others slip back hopelessly, mired in their tracks. What it is that goes on moment by moment in a man’s life is forever unfathomable. No man can possibly relate the whole story, no matter how limited a fragment of his life he may choose to dwell on. It is this aura of the unknown, in which the real struggle takes place, that alone interests me. In describing facts, events, relationships, even trivia, I am constantly endeavoring to make the reader aware of the all-pervasiveness of that dark, mysterious realm in the absence of which nothing could happen."
–Henry Miller, The World of Sex (1940)
Adventure is equal parts external and internal
"You can’t see the teeth on a buzz-saw. …Too much diversion can keep us from knowing how miserable or how happy we are, what bores we are or what fun, how much we want, need or lack. Each day on the river I shed more and more of my external self until I find eventually that I’m left totally alone with the core, facing myself as angry and aggressive, often afraid, no physical superman. Just a man and nothing special. A vacation is external. A pilgrimage is internal. An adventure combines them."
–Eddy L. Harris, Mississippi Solo (1988)
Some simple logic about work and life, from Edward Abbey
"I don’t believe in doing work I don’t want to do in order to live the way I don’t want to live."
–Edward Abbey, The Fool’s Progress (1988)
Tom Robbins on one’s first taste of travel
"Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere — the sudden revelation that there is a there out there."
–Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
Jean-Paul Sartre on adventure
"’What sort of adventures?" I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an events out of ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.’"
–Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1964)
Douglas Coupland on why so few people go vagabonding
"option paralysis: The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none."
–Douglas Coupland, Generation X (1991)
Tanya Shaffer on the kindness of strangers
"Here’s what I love about travel: Strangers get a chance to amaze you. Sometimes a single day can bring a blooming surprise, a simple kindness that opens a chink in the brittle shell of your heart and makes you a different person when you go to sleep — more tender, less jaded — than you were when you woke up."
–Tanya Shaffer, "Looking for Abdelati" Salon, Feb. 7, 1999
Dear Ms. Solve It,
