A01=Frederick J. Ruf
Alphonso Lingis
ambiguity
Author_Frederick J. Ruf
Category=JBCC
Category=QRVJ1
Category=WT
common sense
culture
danger
death
discovery
dream
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
eq_travel
Europe
exploration
France
Greece
guidebooks
guides
Henry Miller
home
hotels
Jack Gilbert
Jerusalem
journals
mark twain
Matthew Arnold
museums
New York
Oaxaca
orientation
Paul Bowles
places
postcolonialism
postmodernism
Ralph Waldo Emerson
religion
restaurants
ritual
santeria
self
sites
strangers
streets
surfaces
Susan Brind Morrow
tourists
trance
value
view
vulnerability
walt whitman
William James
Product details
- ISBN 9780813926742
- Weight: 309g
- Dimensions: 139 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 02 Nov 2007
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Why do we travel? Ostensibly an act of leisure, travel finds us thrusting ourselves into jets flying miles above the earth, only to endure dislocations of time and space, foods and languages foreign to our body and mind, and encounters with strangers on whom we must suddenly depend. Travel is not merely a break from routine; it is its antithesis, a voluntary trading in of the security one feels at home for unpredictability and confusion. In ""Bewildered Travel"", Frederick Ruf argues that this confusion, which we might think of simply as a necessary evil, is in fact the very thing we are seeking when we leave home. Ruf relates this quest for confusion to our religious behavior. Citing William James, who defined the religious as what enables us to ""front life,"" Ruf contends that the search for bewilderment allows us to point our craft into the wind and sail headlong into the storm rather than flee from it. This view challenges the Eliadean tradition that stresses religious ritual as a shield against the world's chaos. Ruf sees our departures from the familiar as a crucial component in a spiritual life, reminding us of the central role of pilgrimage in religion. In addition to his own revealing experiences as a traveler, Ruf presents the reader with the journeys of a large and diverse assortment of notable Americans, including Henry Miller, Paul Bowles, Mark Twain, Mary Oliver, and Walt Whitman. These accounts take us from the Middle East to the Philippines, India to Nicaragua, Mexico to Morocco - and, in one threatening instance, simply to the edge of the author's own neighborhood. ""What gives value to travel is fear,"" wrote Camus. This book illustrates the truth of that statement.
Frederick J. Ruf, Associate Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, is the author of Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self.
