This week while reading The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (an enlightening thinker if outdated), I came across the following provocation: “A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet his Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinita or his Socrates in the Agora, and quite another for one who goes without such aching need. The latter is only a tourist, the former is looking for completion.”
These lines are originally an illustration of the author’s point (not very important here, but …) that all life’s experiences, travel as well, mean less to young people in modern times because youth lacks sexual prohibition: intellectual ecstasy and sexual discovery were once intertwined; now, both are at the same time (supposedly and erroneously) easily attained and easily dismissed. Of course, it’s difficult to take this nostalgia-driven argument seriously, but the claim that “the former is looking for completion” led me through a jungle of others’ thoughts on the subject of why we travel.
It’s timely, too. Earlier last week I had planned to write a bit in response to World Hum’s response to an article in The Wilson Quarterly about why we travel — or, actually, why we shouldn’t. The author makes the case for “staying put.” As so often happens, though, I dithered. Was it really important to dissect the essay (which ran through the various reasons of why travel was no longer appealing, and why it no longer answers former needs of discovery and explorations) — excellently written though it was — to find that its thicket of historical and literary quotes failed to lead logically to its conclusion? Or that the conclusion was still a valid point despite the problematic premises? Not really. Reason being that, condensed from literary references and musings, it in the end devolves into the old question of traveler vs. tourist, a distinction I’m tired of hearing about, and which was defined most aptly and definitively by Thoreau: “Where is the ‘unexplored land’ but in our own untried enterprises? To an adventurous spirit any place — London, New York, Worcester, or his own yard — is ‘unexplored land,’ to seek which Frémont and Kane travel so far. To a sluggish and defeated spirit even the Great Basin and the Polaris are trivial places.” In other words, it all depends on who’s taking the trip.
Allan Bloom’s incidental point of what the traveler is looking for brings the question back into knottier territory. It’s easy to be blithe about the Wilson essay, to answer that travel broadens our experiences and minds and in general makes the world a better, more understanding place. It’s easy to point happily to Pico Iyer’s old essay on Salon and say, “There, he said all that needs saying.” (And how eloquently, too!) And maybe we all believe it. But the easy answers are often falsehoods we tell ourselves.
Many travelers, and especially travel writers, try to be a little more honest when we say that we are drawn by an insatiable curiosity, a wanderlust akin to a gourmand’s love of food — we can never get enough. The truth is, we travel because we feel like it. Because we want to. And the rougher truth is that we don’t know why. What’s worse is that, as with so many other issues in our lives, we’re unwilling to examine the question.
Most travelers think that travel makes them better people. Better in what way? Sure, you get a wider sense of the world, learn new cultures, and hopefully leave a good impression of your own manners and respect for others’ traditions. You come back. If you’re a writer, maybe you spin a tale showing that women struggle against expectations in various ways worldwide, or about a strange encounter demonstrating how small our world is. My question is, does it lead you closer to believing in anything greater than yourself? How many people use travel to look more deeply into existence, and not just at how the world fits together?
Consider Bloom’s later discussion of Nietzsche’s critique of modern democracy. “Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.” For all but the most aware people, travel too often falls into another category of frenzy.
This is what the Wilson author is pointing out when he says: “I’m not proposing inertia as a permanent option; the economy couldn’t take it. But as a temporary measure, a counter to the ceaseless spin of our lives, lasting just long enough for us to get our bearings and sort out a bit more of what’s fantasy about the world from what’s purposeful, it has its appeal. Stillness, silence, the reflective pause — air and head cleared of noise — are about as welcome today as plague rats were in the Middle Ages. ”
How many of you read the old Iyer essay to the end, all four pages of it (our attention spans, as we know, are not what they once were)? How about this passage: “I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.”
If we are honest, we of course know that we are looking for something when we travel. It takes a brave soul to admit that they’re simply looking for completion, for an opportunity to “know thyself” that is so rare in our lives. To quote the inestimable Iyer once again: “‘The ideal travel book,’ Christopher Isherwood once said, ‘should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.’ And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.”
