Travel is at its
best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be
alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your
meandering impressions with their own: if they are companionable they
obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with
non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with “Oh, look, it’s raining’,
and ‘You see a lot of trees here’. Traveling on your own can be terribly
lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling
wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups tend to say things like, ‘Where is
the rest of your team?’). I think of evening in a hotel room in a strange
city. My diary has been brought up to date; I hanker for the company; What do
I do? I don’t know anyone here, so I go out and walk and discover the three
streets of the town and rather envy the strolling couples and the people with
children. The museums and churches are closed, and toward midnight the
streets are empty. If I am mugged I will have to apologize as politely as
possible: ‘I am sorry, sir, but I have nothing valuable on my person.’ Is
there a surer way of enraging a thief and driving him to violence?
It is hard to see clearly or to think
straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious,
but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage
when someone is close by thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is
discovery, not diversion, that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness
to capture that vision, which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be
special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that
quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions.
Later impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be
verified and refined; and in any case I have the satisfaction of finishing
the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often opposite of a
rest. ‘Have a nice time,’ people say to me at my send-off at South Station,
Medford. It was not precisely what I had hopped for. I craved a little risk,
some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own
company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be
mine on that train to Limón .
From ‘The Old Patagonian Express’ by Paul Theroux
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Complete these
statements by choosing the answer you think fits best.
- Traveling companies are a disadvantage,
according to the writer, because they;
(a) give you the wrong impression about the
journey.
(b) distract you from your reading.
(c) intrude on your private observations.
(d) prevent you from saying what you think.
- It has been assumed by Japanese that he;
(a) belongs to a group of botanists.
(b) is excessively odd to travel alone.
(c) needs to be directed to his hotel.
(d) has wandered way from his party.
- His main concern in the evenings was to;
(a) take some physical exercise.
(b) avoid being robbed in the street.
(c) overcome his loneliness.
(d) explore the sights of the city.
- We gather from the passage that the main
purpose in traveling was to;
(a) test his endurance.
(b) prove his self-sufficiency.
(c) experience adventure.
(d) respond to new experiences.
(d) respond to new experiences.
ANSWERS:
Complete these
statements by choosing the answer you think fits best.
- Traveling companies are a disadvantage,
according to the writer, because they;
(c) intrude on your private observations.
- It has been assumed by Japanese that he;
(d) has wandered way from his party.
- His main concern in the evenings was to;
(c) overcome his loneliness.
- We gather from the passage that the main
purpose in traveling was to;
(d) respond to new experiences.
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