Phil Gyford

I’m hopeless at going on holiday — I can put it off forever unless there’s a reason to go for a specific event. But I liked Paul Theroux’s description of why he travels in his article in the Guardian on Saturday, about a trip to the Colombian jungle:

I travel to find obstacles, to discover my limits, to ease the passage of time, to reassure myself that innocence and antiquity exist, to search for links to the past, to flee from the nastiness of urban life and the paranoia, if not outright dementia, of the technological world.

I must remember that. Also, entirely unrelated, but from the same newspaper section, and so I can find it again:

Perhaps classic is a term that has become a mana, which as you will know, is a term defined by Levi-Strauss as “an indeterminate value of signification, devoid of meaning in itself and capable of receiving any meaning whatsoever”.

I hate it when anything’s described as classic, and it’s good to have a reason why. From a book review by Stuart Jeffries.