“The habituation of workers to the assembly line was made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto ‘Be frugal and free’, the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lears writes, ‘Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly.’”
–Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009)

“Travel writing isn’t really an exploration of where you’ve been, so much as an explanation of where you’ve come from. All journeys end up at the same address. Back home. Travelers don’t write for the people they visit, but for the people they’ve left behind.”
–A.A. Gill, AA Gill is Away (2002)

“Pilgrimage seems to be a means of reinforcing certainties of faith. Independent travel can be about challenging one’s idea of living.”
–Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail From Istanbul to India (2006)

“The best kind of travel involves a particular state of mind, in which one is not merely open to the occurrence of the unexpected, but to deep involvement in the unexpected, indeed, open to the possibility of having one’s life changed forever by a chance encounter.”
–Elisabeth Eaves, “Wanderlust,” World Hum, Feb. 12, 2009

“We all go through a similar process of being formed by the culture around us. It is something described well in Bruce Wexler’s book Brain and Culture: Neuroscience, Ideology and Social Change, in which Wexler argues that much of human conflict arises from our efforts to reconcile the world as we believe it to exist (our internal structures) with the world we live in. According to Wexler, we develop an inner world, a neuropsychological framework of values, cause and effect, expectations, and a general understanding of how things work. This inner world, which underpins our culture, forms through early adulthood, after which we strive to ensure it exists, or continues to exist, in the world outside. Those inner structures can change in adulthood, but it is more difficult given our decreased brain plasticity. That different internal structures exert different pressures on the mind (and body) should not be surprising. Every culture has its own logic, its own beliefs, its own stresses. Once one buys into its assumptions, one becomes a prisoner to the logic. For some people, that means a march toward its more tragic conclusions.”
–Frank Bures, “A mind dismembered: In search of the magical penis thieves,” Harper’s, June 2008

“When we accept uncritically what others counsel us, the path they prescribe for us, we risk losing for naught the one thing we possess in inevitable yet mysterious finitude: time, the numbered days of our lives.”
–Jeffrey Tayler, “Insanity and the Traveling Life,” World Hum, Jan. 21, 2009

“The writer and commentator Viktor Yerofeyev said he had noticed that the more Russians traveled, the more they tended to lose some of the coarseness that at times characterized Soviet society. “Through all this travel, we are seeing a change in mentality at home,” Mr. Yerofeyev said. “People are now seeking pleasure, whether it is in the night clubs of Moscow or in restaurants. Travel is a continuation of that pleasure. Just to have pleasant lives, not to suffer, to feel positive. Their life compass changes, from ‘I don’t care about anything’ to ‘I would like to have a better life.’ Travel is a part of this.” “The world is becoming part of their lives,” he said.”
–Clifford J. Levy, “Free and Flush, Russians Eager to Roam Abroad,” New York Times, June 15, 2008

“The sentimental tourist makes images in advance; they grow up in his mind by a logic of their own. He finds himself thinking of an unknown, unseen place, as having such and such a shape and figure rather than such another. It assumed in his mind a certain complexion, a certain color which frequently turns out to be singularly at variance with reality.”
–Henry James, “Saratoga” (1870)

“My own policy is to try to be as non-judgmental about another culture as I can while I’m there. You know, “when in Rome…” and all that. But I’m not a complete relativist either. Aldous Huxley once said that when one is living in a developed secular country, one longs to live in a spiritual country instead. One craves the deep meaningful connections of ancient tradition. “One is all for religion,” he wrote, “until one visits a really religious country. Then one is all for drains, machinery, and the minimum wage.” When Huxley was living in England and America, he read the Buddha regularly and took great inspiration, but when he lived in India and the Far East he read biographies of Henry Ford with admiration. My own experience in Southeast Asia resonates with Huxley’s insight about the ways that different cultures romanticize each other.”
–Stephen T. Asma, Bookslut.com interview, October 2005

“Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.”
–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)