The first time I was in Paris, I went to the Louvre and -- like a million other tourists before me -- headed straight for the Mona Lisa. Since the famous French museum houses one of the most extensive art collections in the world, I'll admit that making a beeline for a painting I'd already...

"To lament that the packaged tour, like the photograph, cheapens and degrades by making all places easy of access, is to miss most of the game. It is to make value judgments with fixed reference to the fragmentary perspective of literary culture. It is the same position that considers a literary landscape as superior to...

"The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar. Descartes, in the early seventeenth century, had observed that traveling was almost like conversing with men of other centuries, a point of view quite unknown before his time. For those who cherish such quaint experience, it...

"With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines. The road is, then, used less and less for travel, and more and more for recreation. The traveler now turns to the airways, and...