Hold The Enlightenment: More Travel, Less Bliss, by Tim Cahill
When you read a book by the author, you have a good idea of what you are going to get, and that is short travel pieces that have humor and often a fair amount of beta male perspective and hipster politics. To be sure, there are elements of this that I find less enjoyable, but the humor and general sad sack nature of the author is enough to cover a multitude of sins–it is easier to appreciate the author the less you take him seriously and the more you take him as a figure of fun. Like the author’s other books, this contains mostly articles that the author has written for magazines that I don’t happen to read, and that most people probably haven’t bothered to read either. Having them in a convenient and easy-to-read volume like this one is certainly worthwhile, as it provides material that is funny and that occasionally offers larger insights (though not as often as the author would wish) on the world that the author finds himself traveling in with a low degree of competence at being sufficiently manly to handle his adventures properly. Since this schtick is intentional, though, one doesn’t feel too bad for the author.
The author begins this book somewhat aggressively in seeking to attack a reviewer who said that the author was not attractive to women, which shows a certain combativeness on his part. Aside from that, the essays are what one would expect–the title essay is a humorous one on yoga, there are essays about the search for a tiger thought extinct that may in fact still exist, and the author finds himself in strange locales and interesting places. He travels to Mali in search of salt mines, hunts for the adorable platypus, visits the house of Boots in Argentina, better known as the home of Butch Cassidy, ponders the overcrowding of a boat on the Congo River, shows off an ability to act like an entranced duck to some people in Bali, and discusses some of the weird (and unclean) foods he has tried. There are essays about swimming with Great White Sharks off the coast of South Africa, discusses the crimes of dolphins that make them human-like, visits cowpersons in Tanzania, and talks about his brother’s dealing in pots, along with some travel experiences and numerous other stories that will occasionally amuse or annoy the reader.
It is refreshing, in a way, that the author does not hide away from talking about the less pleasant aspects of his character. Most telling is his admission of being a bully when it came to instructing others on travel writing, in which he brings a writer to tears, making her leave the seminar in humiliation after he picks on the lead sentence in something she had written, without appreciating that not everyone writes to a mass audience. The fact that the author does write to a mass audience does make this easier to relate to, as this sort of writing would be pretty insufferable if the author added to his other issues that of being a snob as well. If one is going to be a putz, at least one should be a putz who has the good sense of trying to relate to others and to be someone that one can laugh with and not take too seriously rather than someone who combines incompetence and arrogance together. That said, let us judge not lest we shall be judged. This is a book that is meant to be enjoyed, and also meant to demonstrate a certain degree of wit and humor and as it generally succeeds one should not be too hard on it.
