Aldous huxley why not stay at home

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Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. All rights reserved. Please sign in to WorldCat Don't have an account? Remember me on this computer. Cancel Forgot your password? Aldous Huxley. Everyman's library , no. For if Paris and Monte Carlo are really so marvelous as it is generally supposed, by the inhabitants of Bradford or Milwaukee, of Tomsk and Bergen, that they are - why, then, the merit of the travellers who have actually visited these places is the greater, and their superiority over the stay-at-homes the more enormous.

It is for this reason and because they pay the hotel proprietors and the steamship companies that the fables are studiously kept alive. Few things are more pathetic than the spectacle of inexperienced travellers, brought up on these myths, desperately doing their best to make external reality square with fable. It is for the sake of the myths and, less consciously, in the name of snobbery that they left their homes; to admit disappointment in the reality would be to admit their own foolishness in having believed the fables and would detract from their merit in having undertaken the pilgrimage.

Out of the hundreds of thousands of 25 Anglo-Saxons who frequent the night clubs and dancing-saloons of Paris, there are a good many , no doubt, who genuinely like that sort of thing. At a table in a corner of the hall sat three young American girls, quite unattended, adventurously seeing life by themselves. And the weariness is felt, within, still more acutely, because precisely of the necessity of simulating this rapt attentiveness of even going hypocritically into raptures over the things that are started in the Baedeker.

There come moments when flesh and blood can stand the strain no longer. Philistinism absolutely refuses to pay the tribute it owes to taste. I remember witnessing one of these rebellions at Venice: A motor boat company was advertising afternoon excursion to the island of Torcello. We booked our seats and at the appointed time set off, in company with seven or eight other tourists.

Romantic in its desolation. Tercel lo rose out of the lagoon. The boatmen drew up at side of a mouldering jetty. A quarter of mile away, through the fields, stood the church. It contains some of the most beautiful mosaics in Italy.

We climbed on shore-all of us with the exception of one strong minded American couple who, on learning that the object of interest on this island was only another church; decided to remain comfortably seated in the boat till the rest of the party should return. I admired them for they should have come all this way and spent all that money, merely for the pleasure of sitting in a motor boat tied to a rotting wharf.

And they were only at Venice. Their Italian ordeal had hardly begun. Padua, Ferrara, Ravenna, Bologna, Florence, Siena Perugia, Assisi and Rome, with all their innumerable churches and pictures had still to be looked at-before the blessed goal of Naples finally reached-they could be permitted to take the liner home again across the Atlantic.

Poor slaves, I thought ; and of how exacting a master. We call such people travellers because they do not stay at home. But they are not genuine travellers, not travellers born. They set out, nourished on fables and fantastical hopes, return whether they avow it or not, disappointed. Their interest in the real and actual being insufficiently lively, they hanker after mythology, and the facts, however curious, beautiful and varied, are disillusionment. It is only the society of their fellow-tourists, with whom they conspire, every now and then, to make a little oasis of home in the foreign wilderness, coupled with the consciousness of a social duty done, that keeps them even moderately cheerful in the face of the depressing facts of travel.

Your genuine traveller, on the other hand , is so much interested in real things that he does not find it necessary to believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, he love3 what is unfamiliarity, he takes pleasure in every manifestation of beauty.

It would be absurd, of course, to say that he is never bored. For it is practically impossible to travel without being sometimes bored. WorldCat is the world's largest library catalog, helping you find library materials online. Don't have an account? You can easily create a free account.

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However, formatting rules can vary widely between applications and fields of interest or study. The specific requirements or preferences of your reviewing publisher, classroom teacher, institution or organization should be applied. The E-mail Address es field is required. More filters. Sort order. Jun 09, readerswords rated it it was ok Shelves: non-fiction. I picked up this book at a used books store, and was intrigued by the theme of this collection of essays- travel writing in the s. The book was originally published in and the copy I picked up was printed in Part 1 of the collection is quite interesting mainly because of the quaint nature of travelling at the time.

The subsequent essays did not hold much interest for me- they seem to be mostly about art, and I skipped to the last section which too did not arouse much interest- e I picked up this book at a used books store, and was intrigued by the theme of this collection of essays- travel writing in the s. The subsequent essays did not hold much interest for me- they seem to be mostly about art, and I skipped to the last section which too did not arouse much interest- except for a short section about Michael Faraday's travels with Humphrey Davy.

Some of the observations are decidedly snobbish and I would say even racist but that was the period when England was a colonial super power. There are a few interesting words that I discovered- mostly that have fallen into disuse or are used much sparingly, like: philoprogenitiviness, blackamoors,diplodocus, meridional and ermetic. There are a few notable insights and quotable sentences, sample the following: "It is in the civilized countries where humans beings eat the most and take least exercise that cancer is most prevalent.

An early Murry is a treasure. Indeed, any volume of European travels, however dull,, is interesting provided it be written before the age of railways and Ruskin. From their appearance, from what they say, one reconstructs in imagination the whole character, the complete life history.

Reading and travelling, they say, broaden the mind, stimulate the imagination, are a liberal education. And so on. These are specious arguments; but nobody is very much impressed by them for though it may be quite true that, for certain people, desultory reading and aimless travelling are richly educative, it is not for that reason that most true readers and travellers born indulge their tastes. Life is not long enough and they waste precious time; the game is not worth the candle. Casual social intercourse is like dram-drinking, a mere stimulant that whips the nerves but does not nourish…But the final argument against large assemblages and in favour of solitude and the small intimate gathering has been, in my case, of a more personal character.

It has appealed, not to my reason, but my vanity. The fact is that I do not shine in large assemblies; indeed, I scarcely glimmer. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator. One must dine at home as well as in restaurants, must give up the amusing game of peeping in at unknown windows to live quietly, flatly, unexcitingly indoors.

View 2 comments. May 09, Kerem rated it liked it. Though there are some gems in it and some really interesting stories as you'd expect from Huxley, some bits are rather dull. The most exciting bits to me were the ones talking about the traveller person, and some of the travel stories that were also vivid. It's an easy and overall enjoyable read so I'd still recommend it. Mar 13, Notes of a Curious Mind rated it liked it Shelves: essays , travel.

A couple of weeks ago, I found in a charity bookshop, a book by Aldous Huxley, a collection of essays titled Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist.

Along the Road covers his experiences of his time on Europe, Italy and France, in particular.