Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

was born, and then drive the long way home, around Spot Pond, taking in all the scenes of my early youth.
    Who are the great travelers? They are curious, contented, self-sufficient people who are not afraid of the past. They are not hiding in travel; they are seeking. Recently I was on the northern Queensland coast of Australia, in an aboriginal reserve. In the most unlikely spot I encountered a beachcomber who had been living there for several years. He was looking for plastic floats and bottles, building a raft that would take him around the top of Cape York in one of the most dangerous channels in the world, the Torres Strait. I asked him if he knew the risks.
    "I'm not bothered," he said. "You can go anywhere, you can do anything, if you're not in a hurry."
    That is one of the sanest statements I have ever heard in my life.
    So many times over the years, in the most far-flung places, I have heard people exclaim, "This reminds me of home" or "This reminds me of"—and name a place where they have been very happy. It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealized versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory.
    Friends are also reminders of where we have been, what we have seen. They are a repository of our past, and friendship and love enable us to retrieve memory. The most human emotions and activities put us in touch with the past, which is another way of saying that neurosis frequently distances us and makes the past ungraspable. When Freud says that only the unsatisfied person has fantasies, he is not saying that the more unhappy you are, the more access you have to memory. On the contrary, he states that if "fantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for the onset of neurosis or psychosis."
    You know how much friendship matters to memory when, for whatever reason, a friend leaves the orbit of your existence. Losing a friend to death or absence or misunderstanding is not only a blow to self-esteem but a stun to memory. The sad reflection that we are losing a part of ourselves is true: part of our memory has departed with the lost friend.
    One of the extremes of this is marital woe—separation and divorce. My wife and I separated in 1990. The pain of that event had many causes. It was an emotional trauma, but it was more—it was as though I had been lobotomized, part of my brain cut away. My wife had been a repository of our shared experience, and I could count on her to remind me of things I had forgotten. When she read something I had written, she had a unique ability to judge it. She always knew, even when I didn't, when I was repeating myself or being a bore. Her presence stimulated my memory, because her memory was an extension of my own. We had lived together and loved each other for more than twenty years.
    It is easy for a writer to think, because of the solitary nature of the profession, that he or she is in this alone. But is that so? A writer cannot be the solitary figure in the Waste Land, the actor on the bare stage. "Everything I have written has come out of a deep loneliness," Henry James wrote. Lonely, yes, but he was not alone—he could not have been and written as he had of such a complex world, so many landscapes, so many levels of society. The paradox is that the writer is involved both in society and in the world, and yet is alienated from it. It is simply not possible to remove yourself from the society of people or the flow of events, yet the very things that stimulate writing are frequently obstacles to the writing process. Travel is a great stimulant, as I said, but it is hell to write while you are traveling.
    I separated from my wife in London and quickly realized that I could not live in the city anymore. That very day I flew to the United States; I needed the comfort of my childhood home. I needed reassurance, the stimuli of those landscapes