Yoga for people who can't be bothered

So I managed to tear through Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It on the flight over It was the only book of his available throught Kindle besides his most recent, which I'd already read: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varnasi. That book is about a forty-ish writer who is in Venice to cover a fashion show, runs from party to party, engages in a fruitless affair with a woman he knows will leave him and at the end of it all is left kind of spent and wondering; the second half is about a writer who may or may not be the writer in the first story. Tihs time he is in Varnasi, supposedly on assignment, except he does not leave and more and more transforms into a sort of Hindu ascetic. If the first part is a depiction of the fruitlessness of desire, the second is about bit by bit giving up that desire. It's an intriguing novel, and left me wanting to read more of him.

I orignally wanted to read his work about Lawrence, which is supposed to be more of a book about someone trying to write a book about Lawrence. But I had to settle for this collection of essays. I was not disappointed.

In one of the early essays, perhaps the first, the writer is living in New Orleans and at one point goes to watch trains go by and contemplates jumping aboard one. But before he can make any decision the train goes by and his chance is gone. This becomes a metaphor for all the things the writer has missed in life: the woman in the street whom he did not approach, for example. It's thje sense of the journey not going where one has planned, of things going wrong, of not much happening. I guess the reason I like to read him is that his journeys are a lot more like the journeys I have--although he seems to have a lot more sex.

He describes what travel for me is like. For example, talking about something he calls the Zone :"That is the thing about the Zone; one moment you can be in it and the next moment you are no longer in it. You are just ins ome place, wishing someting were different." Yeah, I've been there.Indeed, the more I read of him the more I am reminded of Emersons' admonition that we need to trust ourselves otherwise we end up reading words on the page that someone else has written but which express our innermost thoughts.