Episodes
I’ve spent 25 years heading off alone into deserts, and jungles and tundra; I’ve been to the last remote corners of our planet. Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, in the age of discovery, men set out to find whole new worlds. The 18th and 19th centuries was the era of exploration, when adventurers went to exploit these discoveries. The last century though was the age of the traveller, when the world was safe enough for individuals to make their own way, to set off and record their personal impressions; as it happens the British particularly loved to do this… But why, and what does this say about us? Is it a legacy of the British Empire? Or perhaps being members of only a small off-shore nation we’ve learnt that we need to study the curious ways of foreigners in order to survive. Or are we just trying to escape what is, let’s face it, a very safe but overcrowded little island? I’m going to follow in the footsteps of those who I think are the three defining travel writers of our time and look through the brief and unique window they gave us onto the world and into themselves. —Bennedict Allen's opening narrationRead more about this topic: Travellers' Century
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)