Yesterday I drove to Sawgrass Mills and bought the summer issue of The Hedgehog Review at Books-A-Million. (One of Martin Amis’s writing rules is to write sentences that other people don’t write.) The theme of the issue was travel and, sitting outside while Hania shopped, I turned to the essay on travel writing. It was rich in academic mind-twisters (even though the author was not identified as an academic) that state the obvious, or the dubious, in a complicated fashion that seems more intent on demonstrating the brilliance of the writer than in making a point. “Travel writing, like travel, is all about the negation of partiality,” the author proclaimed, “ – how a partial and limited perspective can expand and communicate while remaining incomplete.”
A lot has been written about travel writing over the years - some of it by me, sometimes in quarterlies - and this writer found something new to say about it. She had penned a sentence that other people wouldn't write. But it didn't give me new insight into the nature of my profession. Clearly, travel writers experience only a fraction of the places they visit, but even that small sampling can be of value. That is both the nature of travel, and part of the reason we write about it.
