Now playing
AudioTravels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
About this film
LibriVox recording of Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes , by Robert Louis Stevenson. Read by Patrick Wallace. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Stevenson's account of his extended walk, in 1878, through uplands and mountains in south-western France amply fulfils this declaration of intent. Stevenson writes with a characteristic wry humour on his own failings as a traveller (who else would admit to hiking with an egg-whisk?), on his travails with Modestine the self-willed donkey (animal-lovers should brace themselves for nineteenth-century attitudes to beasts of burden) and on the discomforts of travel in the age before mass tourism; and with, perhaps, a certain youthful (he was 24) condescension in his observations of peasant life on the cusp of modernity. There is also a young man's earnestness in the poetic lyricism with which he describes the landscape and scenery of the region, and above all in the core of the book: an extended…
Directors & creators
Robert Louis Stevenson
Subjects
Stevenson; Donkey; Cevennes; France; Travel; librivox
More from this pool