Tourist Trapping

As you watch the short focus video The Spectacle | Vimeo | New Yorker | 20m perhaps reflect on Blaise Pascal’s sentiment that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room or, for that matter, in the Highland gardens. Breathe it in for five minutes, prepare to flinch about that point, and you might become misanthropic by minute eighteen hoping the figure perched on a rock with that look-ma pose will slip and fall into the crevice and thereby score one for nature.

So why do we travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth does not withhold many secrets anymore. When does travel degenerate into snobbism, a stunt, even blasphemy? A tourist may be trapped by the narcissist fallacy of travel to imagine that one’s mere passing sets up a charmed understanding between traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension.

We sometimes sense that we have reached a moment when travel might no longer be necessary, with virtual tours offering stunning connections to the wider world, from dramatic landscapes, wildlife, and historic sites to views of museum contents that surpass those which can be detected in person. It may be just a matter of time before we’ll be able to virtually smell the cooking.

Nonsense might be the response. We travel to be in some sense transformed. Travel is a process, a transit, a sheer going there as much as an arriving. Yes, but let us discuss the consequences of travel en masse with the wholesale invasion that amounts to the transformation of the very object into a theme park. We came, we saw, we spoiled everything.

On the other hand, let us discuss examples of how travel, especially if one travels alone, can make the mind peculiarly alive. A deeper truth might thus emerge where it is oneself that one encounters in traveling: certainly other people, other cultures, other times – but still, always oneself in a way otherwise not available by sitting quietly in your room.

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