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leda's review against another edition
3.0
A couple of weeks ago, I found in a charity bookshop, a book by Aldous Huxley, a 1928 collection of essays titled Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist. It’s a wonderful, witty, little book, inexplicably overlooked. Although Aldous Huxley, who is best known for his famous novel, ‘Brave New World’, lived a varied life and travelled extensively. Along the Road covers his experiences of his time on Europe, Italy and France, in particular.
Aldous Huxley writes what means to be an authentic, real traveller, not the variety of tourists with too much money to spend who stay within their comfort zone and only stick with visiting the popular sights or staring, often yawning, artistic monuments they do not understand, pretending to enjoy themselves. I’ve always assumed that this attitude is a recent phenomenon, but Huxley proves that there were always around.
Huxley writes:
Aldous Huxley writes what means to be an authentic, real traveller, not the variety of tourists with too much money to spend who stay within their comfort zone and only stick with visiting the popular sights or staring, often yawning, artistic monuments they do not understand, pretending to enjoy themselves. I’ve always assumed that this attitude is a recent phenomenon, but Huxley proves that there were always around.
Huxley writes:
“….. For tourists are, in the main, a very gloomy-looking tribe. I have seen much brighter faces at a funeral than in the Piazza of St Mark’s. Only when they can band together and pretend, for a brief precarious hour, that they are at home, do the majority of tourists look really happy. One wonders why they come abroad.
The fact is that very few travellers really like travelling. If they go to the trouble and expense of travelling. If they go to the trouble and expense of travelling, it is not so much from curiosity, for fun, or because they like to see things beautiful and strange, as out of a kind of snobbery. People travel for the same reason as they collect works of art; because the best people do it.
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