Eric Newby, 1919-2006.(Notebook)(In memoriam)

In his 1982 autobiography A Traveler's Life, the delightful travel writer Eric Newby, who died this past October at the age of eighty-six, expressed his thoughts on human existence.

 
   In his writings, the Venerable Bede compared 
   the span of human life to coming out of darkness 
   into a lighted hall and, having reached 
   the end of it, finding oneself under the necessity 
   of setting off once more into the all-embracing 
   gloom. To me life has been more 
   like one of those sections of autostrada on the 
   Italian Riviera, on which there are lots of tunnels, 
   some long, some short, with sunlit open 
   spaces of varying lengths between them for 
   ...