Travels of a Born Tourist, Chapter II: General Theory of Tourism

Somewhere in Ruskin's works--of course I cannot find it at the moment--he writes about the absurdity of imagining one took in anything while traveling through a countryside or a city at a speed of five miles per hour in a carriage. The sensible world, he asserted, could only be meaningfully experienced by the mind when the body was engaging it within the limits nature had imposed upon it. To be said to have traveled through a country implies that one passed it at no swifter speed than that of an ordinary walk, which would require one to encounter the landscape, the inhabitants of the country, one's bodily needs, etc, in a proportion appropriate to one's humanness, undistorted by the aids of machinery. I do not remember how or if he accounted for traveling over water, but I would presume that doing so in any type of enormous, loud, motorized craft providing vulgar pleasures--or flying in an airplane--were not experiences he would have recognized as having actually been somewhere in any sort of educational or spiritual sense.

Modernity in general, and especially the global travel boom of the post-1990 era which has accelerated and spread in a staggering manner trends that had been slowly evolving at least since Herodotus went to check out the antiquities of Egypt, have aroused in many--as with all phenomena nowadays, perhaps too many to be accomodated without annoyance--thoughtful people the sense, articulated with various degrees of insight and skill, that something is amiss. That the experiences represented by the airport, the tourist hotel, the guided tour, the sunglass and umbrella vendors at ancient or holy sites, the strange and jarring ubiquity of the English language and its television and popular music in places where one would not consider it as belonging all converge to diminish the status, force of intellect and personality of the would-be traveler (and are therefore felt to be in some way not "real"), has become a cliche. Anyone who attempts to visit a major international city or world renowned sight in our age for a short time without an established reputation in his field, a brilliant personality or extraordinary beauty, especially if he or she is over thirty, will be largely dependent on the strength of his imagination to perceive himself as having any contact with the vital life, intellectual, historical, cultural, sensual, of these almost suprahuman places. One shops, one eats, one is transported in machines, sometimes one gets drunk or talks to other tourists about commonplace matters which do not lead to either enlightenment or sensual titillation of any kind, and one goes home, more often than not longing to go back; for one has still, in all the layers of contrived experience in which his journey has enmeshed him, been infected with the hope of capturing the elusive, ideal experience that one has glimpsed or felt, perhaps very intensely, the possibility of. This hope is the great enticement behind most conceptions of and longings for tourism by people unsophisticated by the standards of the travel elite. In their lifeless hometowns and offices they have, not being interesting themselves, given up all hope that anything that would be really interesting or fun to an adult with a strongly developed mind will ever transpire. But it is impossible to imagine that if one spent enough time hanging about in Rome or Paris, however dull one may be, that nothing exciting would ever happen to him again.

The significant trends of recent decades in the area of tourism of course reflect different types of tourists' scheming and trying to improve their perceived chances of attaining these elusive meaningful experiences. It is hardly surprising that disappointment is the prevalent tone of most travel books written by quasi-intellectuals or people who haven't any instinct for rustling up money. Jealousy is strongest among this group because its competition is in a certain sense the most desperate one. I would guess that only around 5% at the most of this comparatively impecunious and educated group actually ever approach realizing the experiences, the thoughts, the wit, the shoes and the sex partners that they long for. These 5%, largely unknown themselves except as a type, become their idols, their authors, their dream girls who slay many a heart when they write their postcards in the corner cafe window with their purse straps secure around their necks or when the Stella Artois is flowing and "Dancing Queen" finally comes on the sound system. But I am getting ahead of myself.

One of the obvious solutions to this dilemma of the elegance-destroying hordes who have overrun the traditional tourist spots for the true sophisticate has been to go to more remote and exotic places, preferably ones that are several decades behind the West in pace of life and infrastructure development, where no sophisticated tourist industry has yet risen up to come between a traveler and his experience, where one reasonably has little expectation of meeting Westerners who remind him too painfully of himself (no one has any problem with meeting Westerners who remind them flatteringly of themselves; such encounters appear however to be rare), as well as, for most people, one where the threat of serious bodily injury or death is still low. Others have in Ruskinesque fashion gone to the extreme of seeking nature pure and spectacular almost wholly untainted by human culture. These are the people who hike across Baffin Island or kayak the rivers of Siberia and report back to the SUV-bound masses about their adventures, making themselves envied figures. Both of these groups are however inferior to the truly awesome figures of the scientist or philologist or archaeologist or even historian who arrives in Kamchatka or the foot of Mt Ararat with actual work of great importance to human learning to pursue and a detailed knowledge of the sorts of things he encounters that the average non-sportsman bourgeois tourist can only dream of having, especially if the accomplished scholars also drink quality spirits and have intense sexual affairs in the evenings while engaged in their research (at one time, at least, serious people did such things). At this level of course we are talking about people with whom the likes of me share no recognizable intellectual or erotic human characteristics. This makes it a good point at which to try to explain the general theory of tourism.

Ruskin's idea, however much truth is contained in it ultimately, of the pace necessary for a minimum of deep contemplation of strange places, has become, if not impossible, problematic to adhere to in a great part of the world today. In my youth I made several attempts to set out on an extensive tour of the United States without a car of my own, which even allowing for hitchhiking and the occasional bus or local train, guarantees that one will have to do a great deal of walking. To be a foot traveler in any populated area of the U.S. apart from such pre-1945 urban parks, college campuses, business districts and residential areas as remain is to be significantly out of proportion to the surrounding physical environment with regard to scale, speed and noise, as well as completely isolated from such human society and activity as persists in such settings. One probably does think more clearly and with more penetration while walking across a giant parking lot or along the side of a busy highway with tractor trailers blowing him several steps off his course every couple of minutes than he does when he is the driver, but the thoughts incline at least as often to despair and the emptiness of one's spirit than to any sense of the sublime. Such people as one does meet as well are more like the tramps in Down and Out In Paris and London or the disturbed loner types on the fringe of society who live in motels and trailer parks, especially in the hinterlands, who are familiar characters in many American movies and books. Any women one meets are usually so unsettling or unpredictably violent-tempered that even I quickly come to wish I hadn't met them. Many times I would spend my days on these journeys just sitting in libraries or wandering around such college campuses as I came upon (I was 18/19 and not in school myself at the time) just to have a glimpse at normal girls my own age, and the to me near godlike men of my generation who could walk and thrive among them. Clearly, I had to admit, whatever I had meant to accomplish by this mode of travelling was a total failure, and I decided I had best try to get back into any academically quasi-respectable college I could, primarily for social reasons.

Having gotten a smattering of a liberal arts education, compared at least to the near-absolute intellectual darkness in which I had previously existed, as well as having for the only real time in my life a status (recent graduate) that would present me as socially acceptable to the mainstream of other travellers and competent, educated natives of popular destinations, having an opportunity to go for a long time on the relative cheap and having nothing else of importance to do besides, I finally made it to Europe (I had been once to Paris but in such a state of ignorance and social ineptitude that I have to consider that trip as an utter failure), where I had at last a slight enough maturity and awareness to implement some methods of touring that were relatively satisfying to me.

While I love airports and flying as much as the next person, I prefer this method of transport generally only as a replacement for ocean liners, to pass over seas or between very distant points of continents, unless of course there is no other way of going. Flying within the United States, or especially Europe, even where great distances are concerned, I do not like. There is a mythology involved with say, going from England to France that insists upon departing from the White Cliffs of Dover or the shipyards of Portsmouth and emerging a couple of hours later on the beaches of Normandy, or from Germany to Italy that requires one to weather the Alps that to skip over in a plane is to in some way miss the point of. Similarly I have always felt that flying into Moscow or Saint Petersburg from Western Europe, or California from the East coast and call it travelling was to cheat oneself. If Napoleon rode a horse from Paris to Moscow, and Mark Twain a covered wagon from St Louis to Carson City to give themselves a proper idea of the space essential to these places, I can certainly at least take a train or drive myself (though the isolation of private driving I think is not really ideal either, though in America it is certainly the only practical way for a modern person to move about on the ground--long distances between even convenience stores and flophouses in the West if one is travelling on foot). For myself when going to Europe I prefer in theory to fly only to Shannon airport in Ireland or to London and to approach the rest of the continent from there along the ground and over water, and for an extended journey I would certainly adhere to this. However for shorter stays I have become more amenable to landing elsewhere, at least if I have been to the place before.

As to time I do not like the idea of going anywhere more than 300 miles distant for less than a week, and even that seems a little flimsy. It is fashionable now to fly to Paris or wherever for the weekend--heck, people are flying into Dubai and I suppose Iraq for 2-3 day visits now. I am not someone who generally lies awake at night thinking about sums of money spent or gas being used extravagantly, but something about this bothers me. I suppose if one is a highly functioning member of the global society, flying from London to Istanbul on Friday afternoon in time for happy hour at the Grand Hotel Byzantium is no different from my grandfather's hustling back on the 5:15 to meet the guys at the Dutch Inn on Rising Sun Avenue, but surely there is an element of depth, or perspective missing in this that Ruskin would be attuned to.

I do not like excessive vanity, luxury, expense or pointedly unintellectual hedonism, all of which trends appear to be gaining rather than losing momentum in our time. I believe strongly that one ought to have some nobler end to pursue if one has the privilege to journey far from home. It need not be strictly educational or altruistic, but the emphasis on sensual pleasures and gratifications of vanity as primarily goods to be bought, sold and displayed without modesty or reflection is somewhat disgusting to me. A place like Israel as currently constituted seems, if nothing else, to force people to take what they are about more seriously than has become customary elsewhere. I believe this sort of atmosphere would appeal to me, though I have certainly overestimated my attraction and devotion to a more substantial life before. True vitality, sensuality, atmospheres bursting with artistic sensibility, natural beauty both of nature and men ferocious, untamed and overwhelming, such qualities being most foreign to myself and my general type, I assume to be rare, though they are the standard language of tourist advertising. I am certain, however, that one cannot buy them, and should not seek to. I am losing my thread of thought however; so I will save my general ravings against bourgeois luxury and continue with the theory in the next chapter.