"I hate traveling and explorers." —Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques (1955) * * * We curse the journey in order to praise the destination more fully. Already in 1778 Boswell related that Dr. Johnson detected a…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
There is that old cliché of travel: that it allows the traveller another perspective on the place left behind, the one he may or may not return to. With the rise of the internet and…
It may be that the interest in and affection for life in the old East Germany is a result of the current German “crisis” — the climbing unemployment, the catastrophic shape of the pension system,…
I took the prescription sleeping pills before take-off but slept only in the thinnest intervals, perhaps one hour out of eight. This was to prove of some difficulty on my first day in Berlin, since…
There is nothing like running into an old friend in an airport to raise the spirits. And there, lurking among the smut in a magazine and gift store were the unmistakable lineaments of an old…
In Phoenix long green means grass. Not the kind you smoke, but the kind flanking business parks, bordering the rarely-used sidewalks of six-lane boulevards, decorating the headquarters of the Arizona Water Resources Administration downtown, growing…
Perusing my correspondence, I see that one year ago almost to the day is when I started into this whole thing. It happened that I was down in New York trying to gain an audience…