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“Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw — actually saw — a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century; there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something — gray-brown bark, say, fissured into a broad, vertical plates — and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? …The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles becomes unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.”
–Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome
“Professor James Petrick of Texas A&M, who focuses on psychology and marketing and their application to tourism, has studied when tourists return to destinations or hotels they’ve visited before. Like many in the field, he believes meeting expectations is a key factor. The take-away for travelers: don’t idealize the places you’re visiting and you’ll be much happier in the end. In an interview, Professor Petrick said that one way we can do that is to distinguish between “organic” and “induced” images of a place. In other words, if travelers can discern what a beach destination or a hotel room really looks like (rather than being suckered by a misleading ad campaign or Web site), they will be much happier in the end — a call for us to look carefully for honest photos and unbiased information.”
–Seth Kugel, “Travel Lessons From the World of Academia,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 2011
“The world is not as small as Google Earth depicts it. I think of the Lower River district in Malawi, the hinterland of Angola, the unwritten-about north of Burma and its border with Nagaland. Nearer home, the urban areas of Europe and the United States. I do not know of a book that recounts the daily life in a ghetto in, say, Chicago; the secret life of a slum, or for that matter, the anthropology of Muslims on a depressed “sink estate” in the British Midlands. The world is full of jolly places but these do not interest me at all. I hate vacations and luxurious hotels are no fun to read about. I want to read about the miserable, or difficult, or inhospitable places; the forbidden cities and the back roads: as long as they exist the travel book will have value.”
–Paul Theroux, “The places in between” Financial Times, May 27 2011
“Museums have long served as surrogates for travel, a particularly important role before the advent of mass tourism. They have from their inception preserved souvenirs of travel, as evidence in their collections of plants, animals, minerals, and examples of the arts and industries of the world’s cultures. While the museum collection itself is an undrawn map of all the places from which the materials have come, the floor plan, which determines where people walk, also delineates conceptual paths through what becomes a virtual space of travel. Exhibiting artifacts from far and wide, museums have attempted from an early date to reconstruct the places from which these things were brought. The habitat group, period room, and re-created village bring a site otherwise removed in space or time to the visitor. During the nineteenth century, exhibitions delivered to one’s door a world already made smaller by the railroad and steamship. Panoramas featured virtual grand tours and simulated the sound and motion of trains and ships and the atmospheric effects of storms at sea. A guide lectured and otherwise entertained these would-be travelers. Such shows were celebrated in their own day as substitutes for travel that might be even better than actually going to the place depicted.”
–Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage
“But where’s the fun? Where’s the adventure? It’s not just “If it’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium,” it’s “If it’s seven o’clock, this must be the Café Le Petit Obsessive-Compulsive, this wine must be the Pinot Noir that I read about on Wines.com, the server must be Yvette, who got high marks on TripAdvisor, and I have to be done eating by eight o’clock so that I can follow the Google Map instructions to the subway station and use the Paris Metro app to catch a train to Montmartre, where I will snap a photo exactly like the one I saw on WikiTravel, which I will then upload to Facebook at the Internet café recommended on the bulletin boards at Yahoo! Travel because they accept American credit cards.”
–Doug Mack, Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day
“GPS navigation, in its present form, …dulls our receptivity to our surroundings by granting us the supposed luxury of not having to pay attention to them at all. In travel facilitated by “location awareness,” we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them, and demanding that they perform for us as advertised. In traveling through “augmented reality,” even the need for places to perform begins to fade, as our openness to the world gives way to the desire to paper over it entirely. It is an admission of our seeming distrust in places to be sufficiently interesting on their own. But in attempting to find the most valuable places and secure the greatest value from them, the places themselves become increasingly irrelevant to our experiences, which become less and less experiences of those places we go.”
–Ari N. Schulman, “GPS and the End of the Road,” New Atlantis, Spring 2011
“Pilgrims were people who figured things out as they walked. On the road you can think forward, you can think back, you can make a list to remember to tell those at home.”
–Anne Carson, “Kinds of Water” (1987)
“Unlike anti-tourists, elite tourists don’t have to worry about those other tourists. They have always been able to pay for privacy and exclusivity. The anti-tourists have a more difficult position, because they belong to the category of tourists who crave a chance to experience the unspoiled, the unexploited, and for them it is crucial to be off the beaten tourist track. Thus their irritation at finding their favorite haunts swamped by other visitors is understandable. Then there is a third and new category, called the “post-tourists,” who may be defined as reformed anti-tourists, who have resigned their project and decided to join in with those other tourists, but always with an ironic distance. Let’s have fun at Disneyland, anyway, even though we know it’s a total fake! But what about all those other tourists? They sometimes become specimens of Turistus vulgaris. As their function is that of Othering, they are a symbolic mass, constantly changing color, form and content. As mass tourism develops, the middle-class stance of the anti-tourist becomes a more common strategy, and it continues to single out the symbol of the vulgar tourist… Turistus vulgaris is an animal that never sleeps alone: T. vulgaris appears in herds, flocks, droves, packs, or swarms. In lumps and clumps, they follow the guides from sight to sight, and they descend on villages or swamp the art museums.”
–Orvar Lofgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing
“I spent a lot of time in cars when I was a kid, and you know, there’s something about cars— you’re going somewhere, you’re occupied, which can make people very unguarded in their conversations. I hitchhiked across the country a couple of times when I was a kid, and I used to have the most intimate conversations with strangers. It’s partly because you’re also a stranger and they know you’re going to be getting out. And you know you’re going to be getting out, so you’ll say things, too. Not everything I said in these cars was truthful, and I’ll bet that the things that were told to me weren’t in every case truthful, either. But you know, they are wonderful theaters, automobiles, and the intensity of intimacy doesn’t become embarrassing because you’re supposedly doing something else—one person’s driving, and you’re both looking ahead, not at each other, and you’re going somewhere, and it gets dark and there’s a kind of trance one gets into, and something lifts, some reticence lifts. It’s just amazing what people will say to each other.”
–Tobias Wolff, interviewed by Jack Livings, The Paris Review, Fall 2004
“If we were to map out our daily movements, we’d find that we tend to stick to what we know with little deviation. We move from our house to our job to the gym to the supermarket, back to the house, and get up the next day to do it all again. Guy Debord, one of the key figures in situationism, proposed taking a holiday from those routines in the form of the derive or drift, which was meant to renew the urban experience by intentionally moving through our urban spaces without intention, opening ourselves up to the spectacle and theater that is the city. Debord claimed that our urban spaces are rich places — full of untold encounters, wondrous architecture, complex human interaction — that we’ve grown too numb to experience. His remedy was to take a day or two out and disorient ourselves by stumbling about our city, tempering the grid of urbanity with the organic quality of not knowing, being pulled by intuition and desire, not by obligation and necessity.”
–Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing
