Ian Littlewood on the emotional detachment of travel

"It is one of the seductions of travel that it allows us to enjoy the extremes of human emotion and experience in the knowledge that next morning we shall wake in a different place, having left them behind. In the normal way of things, sex, death and religion may be fascinating but they are also embroiling; their social contest imposes responsibilities and requirements. On the tourist they have no lasting claim; tomorrow will be another scene. The detachment allows them to become objects of the spectacle, along with everything else."
--Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates (2001)

Note: All this week I will be featuring outtakes from Ian Littlewood's Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex, which I recently finished reading. I won't do a full review on the book, however, because of my disappointment with the fact that the book didn't include pictures.

(Naw, I'm just joking. It's a fine book, but it just didn't inspire an extended comment from me -- perhaps because it focuses so acutely on literary travel from the Victorian Age. Had it included more contemporary perspectives, I might have been inspired to write a full review.)