“THE KINDNESS AND HELP HE RECEIVED OVER 70 YEARS OF TRAVELLING HAVE MADE HIM GENEROUS, TOO”
Few books match
Ted Simon’s Jupiter’s Travels in vulnerability, wit, and fatalism. Its publication in 1979 placed it at the zenith of the late 20th-century travel writing boom, when “why not?” was still a good enough reason to go on a journey and write a book about it. “I wasn’t an expedition, or a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society,” Simon wrote of his four-year, round-the-world motorcycle journey. “I wasn’t proving a product, or making a movie, or breaking a record, or ‘doing it for England.’ I wasn’t even a fanatic of motorcycles, never having ridden one before.”
That the motorcycle was incidental to the trip (“Just the vehicle for the narrative,” Simon said), and that he considered himself a neophyte rather than cynic (he was, after all, 42, and had already travelled relatively widely both personally and as a journalist working on his 1970 book about the Grand-Prix racing, ) gave a youthful glow of optimism, and made it evergreen. The first pages capture so acutely the intense madness that characterizes setting out on a journey — the adrenaline and despair, the panic and
