Without Reservations is one of my favorite books. It blends language, cities, travel and reflection in a way that I tremendously enjoy. I don't remember how I came across the title, only that I was very grateful for having found it. During my stint in Vietnam, I found myself missing the book. It was an unusual feeling. I started re-reading it when I returned home and for the first time in my life made notes on a book, underlined text and committed the worst of all book-related sins, dogeared pages. I don't feel guilty though. This is one of the few books that I intend to take with me and there is so much in the book that I rather vainly believe reflects my life, that I am going to hang on to this copy for life. It also reminds me of my intent to search for (or start?) a book club that enjoys fiction. In brief it is the story of Alice Steinbach, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, who decides to take a year off from work and travel. She goes to Paris, London, Oxford and Italy and spends time there. She reminds me that to get second chances, one must first make mistakes. I can't offer much of a review, I am clearly biased. What I will leave you with are my favorite bits from the book. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did and they offer hope and comfort to you in the way they have to me:
"Life's like that...with awesome impersonality it ambushes us, changing our lives and the lives of those we love in an instant."
"I'm still ambitious...Just in a different way."
"Is it possible to change your outer geography without disrupting the inner geography? The travels within yourself? Today I traveled back to my past and forward to a future shaping itself somewhere at the edge of my thoughts. But I also traveled to a place less often visited: the childlike purity of the ticking moment."
"But the past, I knew, still had the power to cast its long shadows...There was quite a few knots I wished I could go back and untie."
"Sometimes I wonder if that's all I add up to...The sum of my sorrows."
"I knew that the kinship of strangers, particularly those met while traveling, is often a temporary kinship. But who's to say length is the yardstick by which to measure such encounters?"
"It was as though the great noise of the world gave way to the soft buzzing whir of childhood memories."
"I suppose it will always puzzle me, the riddle of why an important lesson is sometimes taught by the unlikeliest of professors."
"You cannot know what is enough until you know what is too much."
"The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places and cats that were lost to me...the inevitability of separation, in one form or other, from all those we love and, in a different way, from ourselves as we were in the past."
"The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares. To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live." ~ Freya Stark
"There is a big difference between falling and diving."
"Life's like that...with awesome impersonality it ambushes us, changing our lives and the lives of those we love in an instant."
"I'm still ambitious...Just in a different way."
"Is it possible to change your outer geography without disrupting the inner geography? The travels within yourself? Today I traveled back to my past and forward to a future shaping itself somewhere at the edge of my thoughts. But I also traveled to a place less often visited: the childlike purity of the ticking moment."
"But the past, I knew, still had the power to cast its long shadows...There was quite a few knots I wished I could go back and untie."
"Sometimes I wonder if that's all I add up to...The sum of my sorrows."
"I knew that the kinship of strangers, particularly those met while traveling, is often a temporary kinship. But who's to say length is the yardstick by which to measure such encounters?"
"It was as though the great noise of the world gave way to the soft buzzing whir of childhood memories."
"I suppose it will always puzzle me, the riddle of why an important lesson is sometimes taught by the unlikeliest of professors."
"You cannot know what is enough until you know what is too much."
"The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places and cats that were lost to me...the inevitability of separation, in one form or other, from all those we love and, in a different way, from ourselves as we were in the past."
"The unexpectedness of life, waiting round every corner, catches even wise women unawares. To avoid corners altogether is, after all, to refuse to live." ~ Freya Stark
"There is a big difference between falling and diving."
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