Travel is often an exercise in difference and digression

“Travel is a form of digression, a digression from daily life. We travel for difference, and so we concentrate on those things — the buildings, the food, the people — that distinguish this place from that, and not on what they have in common. On the one hand that lets us see what the inhabitants themselves no longer can, the things they take for granted, bedding perhaps, or ways of giving change. On the other, it ensures that we not only highlight but even exaggerate the differences between places, for what most strikes us are the exceptions to the normal run of our lives. And in consequence nearly all travel writing depends upon metonymy. Or perhaps upon cliché. It identifies those aspects of a country or a culture that differ from other countries, other cultures, and then identifies that part with the whole. Nobody writes about Italy, for example, and notes that many telephones do work, except against a background assumption that most of them won’t and maybe even shouldn’t; not if they’re proper, pre-cellular Italian telephones. No, the writer concentrates on those that don’t work because that’s what tells him that he is indeed in Italy and not Illinois.”
–Michael Gorra, “The Golf Courses of Berlin,” The Smart Set, April 9, 2008

Posted by | Comments (1)  | January 4, 2009
Category: Travel Quote of the Day, Travel Writing


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