I'm still traveling
The Road to Oxiana at a leisurely pace. I think this book has been best enjoyed in small bites. I have finally arrived at the last section of the journey. While I love the beautiful writing and how well it paints an image, I wish there were more photos incorporated into the text. It would take ages to stop and research all of the places. I just discovered these helpful links today and hope that others find them useful. I wish that I had found them earlier!
The Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London has allowed a selection of Byron's photos to be published here:
https://archnet.org/collections/18
I also found this wonderful blog that has made a project to research the monuments in the book.
https://squarekufic.com/the-road-to-oxiana-project/
The blog also includes a lovely biography, a map of the monuments with dates and the story of how the book was written. Fascinating! He did achieve the spontaneous effect of one picturing him writing the journal as he traveled.
Quote:
In the form of a travelogue, the book is an accurate reportage of the long, exotic journey of Byron and his friend Christopher Sykes. It is extremely romantic thinking of Robert Byron, on those snowy days blocked in Qala i Now, writing the diary at length, writing down the situation of the road and his sickness. Isn’t it evocative? And the reader feels the changes in his writing due to external circumstances, even more so when he records ‘I have been reading Proust for the last three days (and begin to observe the infection of uncontrolled detail creeping into this diary)’.
In fact, the travelogue was written after the journey, and it took him three years of constant work to complete and perfect the book. As Acton reports, he labored hard ‘to obtain an effect of spontaneity’.
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