Maugham the Travel Writer

“The wise man travels only in imagination.” - Maugham

Greetings,

Pico Iyer has published an article entitled The Perfect Traveler about Somerset Maugham in World Hum.

“A novelist must preserve a child-like belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence,” he wrote late in life. “He must never entirely grow up.”

As a young man, Maugham was taught, he says, by an anatomy teacher that “the normal is the rarest thing in the world,” and when he was traveling he spent little time looking at the sights, but went off instead “on the search for emotion,” as he put it in his early book on Spain, collecting “characters,” picking up stories at the bar, using the Alhambra or the temples of Thailand as a launching pad for inquiries into beauty and impermanence and illusion. And what gives his work its particular power is that, you can tell, he remained all his life a stowaway at heart, whose spirit lay with the wastrel and the seeker. 

Delightful.  Read more...

Metta.