“I reflected on why, over the years, I’d come to think of France as imbued with a ‘Janus culture,’ a nation whose world-view, like the ancient god of thresholds, managed at the same time to look back and ahead,” observes David Downie in Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James. Janus lived simultaneously in the past and present. This struck me as absolutely appropriate… Janus was contemporary France. Mr. Downie and his wife walk the […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

  In Falling Off the Map, renowned travel author Pico Iyer says “Lonely Places are the places that don’t fit in; the places that have no seat at our international dinner tables; the places that fall between the cracks of our tidy acronyms (EEC and OPEC, OAS and NATO).” Published in 1993, Iyer’s essays capture “moods [of countries he visits] that would not change with history’s tide.” A few examples:   North Korea, for all its anonymity — its air of Everyplace  —  […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

  What is the unum in the American pluribus? What is the “out of many, one,” those cultural values, attitudes, customs, historical heritage and other distinctions answering the question, “What holds us together?” In The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America from Key West to the Arctic Ocean, Philip Caputo asks this question of people he meets. Caputo begins “his long journey” in 2010 with wife, and two English Setters, truck and Airstream trailer at Key West, ending it months later […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel

In The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, Edmund White dedicates his memoir to the flâneur — the ambler “who loses himself in the crowd, who has no destination and goes where caprice or curiosity directs his or her steps… in search of experience… pure, useless, raw.” Going for a stroll [in Paris]… gave birth to that eminently Parisian compromise between laziness and activity known as flânerie! …More than any other city Paris is still constructed to tempt someone […]

Categories: Tucker Cox, ZiR • Tags: travel