The Kindness of Strangers

Rolf Potts recently posted on vagablogging  --  my favorite travel site on the web  --  this quote from Paul Theroux:

“Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.”


My own experience conforms, but I worry about it as a general advice, as Theroux and I are both gentlemen of a particular age and sort, and what is true for us may not be so for others.  I think neither Paul nor I need be concerned that we might be carried off by white slavers.

With the fall of the Iron Curtain we are now learning that it was also holding in a lot of bad sorts who, having learned their trade under the bare-knuckled police regimes of the old Soviet Bloc are now delighted to find themselves in lush pastures policed by well-meaning liberals.  European regimes that can hardly deal with gypsy children now find themselves confronted by ruthless and well-financed Eastern European gangsters.

In most foreign countries that I would go to in the first place I would trust the natives more than my fellow travelers, for while the latter may be more familiar, they are not, as are the people who live there, subject to the same constraint of concern for their reputation. 

Years ago in an antique shop in Athens the proprietor saw that I was wearing a money belt and seemed to take offense at it: “You don’t need that in Greece,” he said.  I answered that I was not worried about the Greeks, but about my fellow travelers, which he found a more reasonable concern.

And I remember, of course, that horrible little person who stole Patrick Fermor’s notebook at a hostel in Munich and could have cost us one of the most wonderful travel books ever written.

Paul Theroux does not like travel blogs

Paul Theroux, probably the best-known travel writer working today, is a famous grouch and he does not like travel blogs.  He told an interviewer in last May’s Atlantic  --  who had suggested there might be a certain bloggish quality about his recent book  --  that he loathes travel blogs.  He finds them hasty, chatty and particular.  “Blogs look to me illiterate . . ., like someone babbling. To me, writing is a considered act . . . something which is a great labor of thought and consideration. A blog doesn't seem to have any literary merit at all.”  Not surprisingly, he does not write a blog.

In all fairness, one must admit the man has something there, plain-spoken as he may present it.  And I know it can be answered that a blog isn’t literature: it’s blogging.  But in which case one needs to have some reason that anyone else would want to read it.  If you have just found a lost city or been raised up as a god by an undiscovered tribe, then the raw data feed could be interesting, but for most of us we need some art to make our more quotidian adventures of interest to others.

It takes effort to make something worth reading.  It is not enough just to have taken the same train. 

And if you want to know what Theroux thinks good travel writing looks like, see his new book, The Tao of Travel, a commonplace book of the great travel writing.