JUNE 27, TUESDAY

THE CASE AGAINST TRAVEL

Apple News+ brings me articles from a wide variety of magazines that I don’t need to subscribe to and has expanded my understanding of science and politics and religion. A New Yorker article yesterday seemed directed right at me after a year and a half of delighting in travel in Greece, Germany, France, England, the USA, Morocco, India again, the Baltic states and the Netherlands with Uruguay, Sicily and Greece to come. The article is titled The Case Against Travel. It is subtitled, “It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.”

I read it carefully, twice, to see what I had gotten wrong in my enthusiasm for travel. The author, Agnes Collard, has traveled a great deal and has lived in a number of cities abroad, so she was speaking from her own experience.

Her first complaint was that people claim that travel is a life changing experience, but when they get back home they don’t seem any different from when they left.

Her second complaint is that tourists do the kinds of things abroad that they wouldn’t bother to do in their home town like looking at important buildings, visiting museums and walking endlessly through their town.

She also points out that tourism is what other people do when they travel, not us, we avoid tourists, even when we do all the things that tourists do. And she goes on to say that when we return and tell our stories, no one wants to listen, we have little impact on others.

While she finds that there are reasons to travel with a purpose, that going in order to say that you have been there with tourist souvenirs to prove it, is frivolous. She argues that if you don’t have a purpose, something that you care about, you are wasting your time traveling and gives a couple of examples. She went to a falconary museum in Abu Dhabi when she had no interest in falcons. It had no effect on her life. Going to the Louvre to glance at the Mona Lisa for 15 seconds, she argues is simply a form of locomotion, something to do while in Paris.

She quotes as authorities a small group of writers who experienced travel and didn’t get much out of it including eminent philosophers Immanuel Kant and Socrates, arguably the greatest philosophers of all time she says, which, I guess, makes them experts on travel. Ralph Waldo Emerson calls travel “a fool’s paradise.”

But in the end, in my mind, she gives herself away when she says, “Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it.” She is just arguing that most of the reasons we give for travel: that it will be a life changing experience or that it will bring us a form of enlightenment or that it will give us new perspectives is generally a pose and isn’t what actually happens to us.

My immediate response after reading this article was to feel that she set up a bunch of straw men and then knocked them all over. Little that she says applies to the enjoyment that I have had traveling during the last year.

To start with I don’t think that I would invite Socrates, Immanuel Kant or Ralph Waldo to accompany me to Morroco, brilliant as they are, because they are encased in their own intellectual cloud and can’t see out of it.

Secondly, it depends upon what kind of a traveler you are and what kind of travel makes you feel more alive whether it is worth doing or not. If you are a tourist doing blindly what other tourists do, if you are set in your ways and unlikely to imagine doing things differently, if the only place you feel comfortable is in your home town, if the only way you can be comfortable abroad is living in luxury separated from the people you are visiting, you are likely not to get much out of the experience.

But the same thing also applies to the things we do at home simply because we are expected to do them like going to church, going to classical music concerts, going to lectures, visiting the local museum, watching the news or the NFL on TV. If we are not open to any of these experiences we will get little out of them. What she seems to be arguing is that people who are not open to new experiences, people who are not good travelers, shouldn’t travel, and certainly shouldn’t show us their tourist souvenirs.

She makes a big deal of locomotion, by which I think she means many travelers simply look for something to keep them moving whether it is going to see the Mona Lisa or simply walking down the street in a strange town. She doesn’t walk much in her home town so why, she asks, should she walk and walk in Paris? Maybe it is because her home town is old hat to her, she knows every street, while in Paris every street has something new. Some people like to walk and some don’t. She shouldn’t force herself to walk, but let other people do what delights them without mocking them.

But she leaves out are the people who travel to have a good time, a stimulating time with new experiences for two weeks. She leaves out the people who simply delight in the way that people in Germany or India live and the ambiance of Germany or India which brings me back again and again. She leaves out the people who do like to stroll through museums (I don’t, I prefer my digital image on my Meural frame). She leaves out people who are curious about other religions, who like to learn other languages, who are delighted by hand made textiles, who like to walk through a crowded bazaar.

In short, she mocks people who aren’t good travelers for traveling, and leaves out those people whom she admits are traveling because traveling is fun or stimulating. If you are retired and can afford it, where would you rather be for a month, in your house at home or living in Paris? Ralph Waldo would prefer to be home in Boston, I would rather be in Paris, not to boast or show off or claim that it changed my life but simply because it makes me feel more alive and is so much fun.