# Read the first page of Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux Read the opening of Fresh Air Fiend by Paul Theroux free, no signup. Travel essays on trains, borders, landscapes, solitude, and the ethics of looking. - Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/fresh-air-fiend-paul-theroux - Genre: Travel writing - Year: 2000 - ISBN: 9780141971612 - Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9780141971612&s=read-page - Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9780141971612 - Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9780141971612 ## The opening @@CHAP@@ Introduction: Being a Stranger For long periods of my life, living in places where I did not belong, I have been a perfect stranger. I asked myself whether my sense of otherness was the human condition. It certainly was my condition. As with most people, my outer life did not in the least resemble my inner life, but the exotic place and circumstances intensified this difference. Sometimes my being a stranger was like the evocation of a dream state, at other times like a form of madness, and now and then it was just inconvenient. I might have gone home except that a return home would have made me feel like a failure. I was not only far away, I was also out of touch. It sounds as though I am describing a metaphysical problem to which there was no solution – but, no, all of this was a form of salvation. I was an outsider before I was a traveler; I was a traveler before I was a writer; I think one led to the other. I don’t think I was ever a scholar or a student in the formal sense. When I mentioned this notion of being a stranger to Oliver Sacks, he said, ‘In the Kabbalah the first act in the creation of the universe is exile.’ That makes sense to me. Exile is a large concept for which a smaller version, the one I chose, is expatriation. I simply went away. Raised in a large talkative and teasing family of seven children, I yearned for space of my own. One of my pleasures was reading; reading was a refuge and an indulgence. But my greatest pleasure lay in leaving my crowded house and going for all-day hikes. In time these hikes turned into camping trips. Fortunately our house was at the edge of town – so I could leave the front door, and after half a mile of walking be in the woods, attractively named the Mystic Fells. On my own, I had a clearer sense of who I was, and I had a serious curiosity about what I found in the woods; the taxonomy of the trees and flowers and birds was a new language I learned in this new world. When I went to Africa, young and unpublished, I became a mzungu, or white man, but the Chichewa word also implies a spirit, a ghost-figure, almost a goblin; a being so marginal as hardly to be human. I did not find it at all hard to accept this definition; I had always felt fairly marginal, with something to prove. So, speaking about myself as a traveler is the most logical way of speaking about myself as a writer. As for my apprenticeship as a writer, I am sure that my single-mindedness was helped by my being out of touch. Both ideas – being a stranger, being out of touch – seem to me to be related. I believed myself to be a stranger wherever I was – even when I was younger among my family at home; and for much of my life I have felt disconnected. You think of a writer as in-touch and at the center of things, but I have found the opposite to be the case. A variation of this concept was once a great topic in colleges. When I was a student it was the obsessive subject – the alienated hero or anti-hero, the drifter, epitomized by the figure of the casual and detached murderer Meursault in Camus’s L’Etranger, or Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, or the trapped and ineffectual Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial, who is a total stranger to the process which is for no apparent reason blaming and victimizing him. There seemed to me something freakish about these men and something formulaic about their predicament. I found these characters and this discussion less persuasive because the characters seemed like stock figures in a morality play. I could not identify with, I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made. ## Books with a similar feel - [A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson](https://uncovered.ink/read/a-walk-in-the-woods-bill-bryson.md) - [The Best American Travel Writing 2012 by Jason Wilson & William T. Vollmann](https://uncovered.ink/read/the-best-american-travel-writing-2012-jason-wilson-and-william-t-vollmann.md) - [Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger](https://uncovered.ink/read/arabian-sands-wilfred-thesiger.md) - [To Jerusalem and Back by Saul Bellow](https://uncovered.ink/read/to-jerusalem-and-back-saul-bellow.md) - [No Baggage by Clara Bensen](https://uncovered.ink/read/no-baggage-clara-bensen.md) - [Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay](https://uncovered.ink/read/bad-feminist-roxane-gay.md) --- Source: Uncovered (https://uncovered.ink). A short sample shown for reading and discovery. Rights holders can request removal at https://uncovered.ink/takedown.