My favorite curmudgeonly travel writer curmudgeons his way back to Africa:
But I had yet other reasons [for making the trip], just as pressing. The main one was physically to get away from people wasting my time with trivia. “I believe the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Life Without Principle,” “so that all our thoughts be tinged with triviality.”
In going away I wanted to frustrate the stalkers and pesterers, to be unobtainable and not live at the beck and call of emailers and phoners and people saying “Hey, we’re on deadline!”---other people’s deadline, not mine. To travel unconnected, away from anyone’s gaze or reach, that is bliss.
---from The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari by Paul Theroux.
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