J. Maarten Troost
J. Maarten Troost
Jan Maarten Troostis a Dutch-American travel writer and essayist...
NationalityDutch
ProfessionWriter
beyond blissfully change changing climate dismissed few levels notice rising sandy storms unaware
We don't think much about climate change and rising sea levels here in the U.S. Beyond a few gardeners, birders and hikers who notice the changes in our own ecosystem, we live on, blissfully unaware of our changing Earth. Our storms - Katrina, Sandy - are dismissed as once-in-a-century events.
altogether certain deficiency escapist evidence expect failure led misses people question simply wants
Escapism, we are led to believe, is evidence of a deficiency in character, a certain failure of temperament, and like so many -isms, it is to be strenuously avoided. 'How do you expect to get ahead?,' people ask. But the question altogether misses the point. The escapist doesn't want to get ahead. He simply wants to get away.
apparently arrow life possibly time
I have been called many things in my life, but if there has been but one constant, one barb, one arrow flung my way time after time, it is the accusation that I am, in essence, nothing more than an escapist. Apparently this is bad, suspect, possibly even un-American.
enjoyable few plotting
Few things are more enjoyable than lingering over the atlas and plotting a trip.
arts chinese major theater
There's a reason that there are oodles of young Aussies, Germans, Japanese, even Chinese backpackers traipsing around the world. They are unencumbered by debilitating student loans. No such luck for the American Theater Arts major with $120,000 in loans.
decided excellent travel
So you've decided to travel around the world. This is an excellent thing to do. It's a precious place, this planet. We should see it.
amazed courses easy faults money others paid pedantic people pointing remarkably remedies sort suggesting
It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.
airplane fairy invisible
Like many air travelers, I am aware that airplanes fly aided by capricious fairies and invisible strings.
virtue civilized civilized-society
Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.
appreciated deprivation overload
It was as if the sensory overload that is American life had somehow led to sensory deprivation, a gilded weariness, where everything is permitted and nothing appreciated.
country lying two
Bwenawa brought my attention to two wooden planks raised about four feet above the ground. On the ledges were lagoon fish sliced open and lying in the sun, the carcasses just visible through an enveloping blizzard of flies. "You see, " said Bwenawa. "The water dries in the sun, leaving the salt. It's kang-kang [tasty]. We call it salt fish." "Ah," I said. "In my country we call it rotten fish.
world claims small-world
No one who claims this to be a small world has ever flown across the Pacific.
war college tea
It is often said that Americans have no sense of history. Ask a college student who Jimmy Carter was and they will likely reply that he was a general in the Civil War, which occurred in 1492, when Americans dumped tea into the Gulf of Tonkin, sparking the First World War, which ended with the invasion of Grenada and the development of the cotton press.
fun believe adventure
I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I’d done before.