Sublime

Bashō’s Narrow Road to the Deep North and Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849) to the great travel books of our own day: the vomiting camels of Thesiger’s Arabian Sands, the muddy Congo paths of Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, the flitting and plodding of Bruce Chatwin in Patagonia—and, I should add, to a lesser degree, nearly everything in travel that I

Even staid, prissy Thoreau, who famously declared that it was enough to have “traveled a good deal in Concord,” felt compelled to visit the more fearsome wilds of nineteenth-century Maine and climb Mt. Katahdin. His ascent of the peak’s “savage and awful, though beautiful” ramparts shocked and frightened him, but it also induced a giddy sort of awe

Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to.