Call nytimes news room8/3/2023 ![]() The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. “A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “ Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting-and, if Emerson and company are right, misses. He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War even so, he was no traveller. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.” Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic-“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said-conceded that travel had a certain cachet. One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. The imagination justifies having to move around to feel. ![]() Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . .
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