The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are bein… - Claude Lévi-Strauss

The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

¿Qué oímos en esas conferencias y qué leemos en esos libros? La lista de las cajas que se llevaban, las fechorías del perrito de a bordo y, mezcladas con las anécdotas, migajas insípidas de información que deambulan por todos los manuales desde hace un siglo, y que una dosis de desvergüenza poco común — pero en justa relación con la ingenuidad e ignorancia de los consumidores — no titubea en presentar como un testimonio, ¡qué digo!, como un descubrimiento original.