Paul Theroux

ensely wooded with old-growth forest as well as coconut palms.

It was a perfect area for paddling a kayak – perhaps the best in the Pacific.

Encouraged by their reaction, the man said, “I was in Columbus, Ohio. Place is full of jigaboos. But up in Ohio they said to me, ‘You’re a hillbilly. You got one leg shorter than the other from stepping around the side of the hills.’”

“Took it as long as I could—just put up with it,” he said, of the term “hillbilly,” which is not the conventional jokey aside of television humor but contemptuous and bitter in the hill communities of Appalachia, implying poverty and ignorance. “Finally I couldn’t take no more. I says to these Ohio boys, ‘You got one leg shorter than the other too, from stepping off the sidewalk into the gutter’”—and he demonstrated this with his legs—“‘to let the niggers go on by.’”

Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion.

lower slopes of Parnassus

They're smug views - self-important ones. Egocentric, you might say. The funny thing about being smug and egocentric and thinking about health and purity all the time, is that it can turn you into a fascist. My diet, my bowels, my self - it's the way right-wing people talk. The next thing you know you'll be raving about the purity of the race.'

She had mistaken egotism for Buddhism.