Title : Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh but I must be entitled to have another go at it.
link : Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh but I must be entitled to have another go at it.
Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh but I must be entitled to have another go at it.
Because there's a new New Yorker article : "The Case Against Travel."• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?"
• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'"
• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'"
• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..."
• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'"
• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"
I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):
But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel....
Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion....
[T]ouristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed?... We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others....
Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon.
Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen,* and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”...
Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection....
______________________
* Credit to the New Yorker for not bowdlerizing Chesterton. I can't remember if we're supposed to hold Chesterton at arm's length. I'm opening a tab for "The Back of the World/The troubling genius of G. K. Chesterton," a 2008 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, which I'll read when I get around to it.
• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?"
• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'"
• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'"
• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..."
• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'"
• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"
I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):
But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage:
I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel....
Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion....
[T]ouristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed?... We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others....
Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon.
Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen,* and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.”...
Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection....
______________________
* Credit to the New Yorker for not bowdlerizing Chesterton. I can't remember if we're supposed to hold Chesterton at arm's length. I'm opening a tab for "The Back of the World/The troubling genius of G. K. Chesterton," a 2008 New Yorker article by Adam Gopnik, which I'll read when I get around to it.
Thus articles Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh but I must be entitled to have another go at it.
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