Goin’ places that I’ve never been, seein’ things I may never see again

 I heard a philosophy professor on the radio, Agnes Callard, who famously wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Against Travel”.  Her basic premise is that the actual, long-lasting benefits of travel are delusional.  All you’re doing is disturbing the lives of people who speak another language, spoiling the very places you profess to admire, while retaining nothing of any enduring value.  That discussing your travels is a type of virtue-signaling that pleases your ego and bores your listeners

Rarely have I disagreed with a person more than Professor Callard.   She has the right to her

opinion, and her feelings, which are hers and fairly held.  One of my best friends hates traveling.  He’s a brilliant, erudite, accomplished man.  We just don’t share the same convictions on this matter, just as I hated the original “Top Gun”, which he loved, and he heaps scorn on my cherished “Independence Day”. 

Callard maintains that “tourist” is a term you use to describe other people with suitcases who go running around the world, but not yourself.  Fair enough, since tourist is clearly a pejorative, often for good reason.  The assumption is these are people who travel badly: dress like slobs, hog scenic overlooks, yell at shopkeepers as if volume will overcome a language gap, gorge on unhealthy snacks and cheap tchotchkes, and fall off cliffs trying to take shareable selfies.  They clump together in their tour group, rarely mingle with the natives, pine for hometown meals and remain blissfully unaffected by the foreign country’s physical and cultural charms.  They’re dumb jerks over there, which means they’re likely dumb jerks over here, too. 

Asked if she’d give a pass to creative people, such as Gauguin in Tahiti, or Picasso in Paris, Professor Callard grudgingly gave an inch.  The thing is, the question itself is fraught with a certain elitist presumption.   A professional accountant, not encouraged to be overly creative, can be utterly entranced and enriched by visiting a new place.  I know this because my brother-in-law was a partner at Deloitte and Touche and was positively glowing after returning the other day from a cruise around Scandinavia.  He doesn’t have to be transformed into a different person, nor would he expect to be, but he now has a mind that’s fuller and more aware than before he hopped on that boat.

My wife spent a few weeks in Africa on safari in four different countries.  She thinks about it every day, and is always moved by the recollections.  Is she a different person?  Not exactly, but she would say she is more of a person, an expanded version.

Entranced, expanded and intellectually refreshed is how I’ve felt after visiting strange new lands.  Notably Japan, Australia, Alaska and Budapest.  You can only really grasp these places, however superficially, by going there.  Driving around the Australian state  of Victoria, I felt like I’d been dropped onto a different planet.  Vast grasslands punctuated by gigantic Eucalyptus, waves of Kangaroo streaming through the grass at startling speeds, a mountainous rainforest where you half expected a Tyrannosaurus to burst out of the tangled tree limbs and vines. 

You might not care to know that on one side of the River Danube is the city of Buda, and on the other side Pest.  By I do.

My wife and I always make a point of talking to people wherever we go, which mostly means conversations with bartenders, waiters and waitresses, cab drivers, bell hops and store clerks.  But these are people who live in their places, and they have a lot to tell you if you ask.  You don’t have to move in with a family to get the basic lay of the land.  People love talking about their lives and their homes.  You just have to engage. 

For creative people, the benefits of travel are self-evident.  James Joyce moved to Paris (along with Picasso, Dali, Hemingway, Stein, Pound, etc., etc.).  Orwell, John Singer Sargent, Joyce Cary, D.H. Lawrence and artists you’ve never heard of journeyed and lived all over the place.  Critics agree that their art was hugely influenced by the changes in venue.

Brain science can explain some of this.  When you’re in familiar surroundings, your mind can sort of relax and shove many basic mental functions down and away from the most cognitive, and energy consuming, portions of the brain, like the pre-frontal cortex.  When you’re in an entirely new environment, your survival instincts kick in, and you become hypervigilant.  Your brain literally gets extra busy.  You also instinctively compare your immediate experience with the well-known, which has the effect of bringing perspective to your life back home.  This is why James Joyce sat in a room in Paris and wrote about Dublin, why Lawrence wrote about English people in Italian villages and an adobe hut in Mexico. 

I love writing in places where I don’t speak much of the language. I’m in the midst of people having a pleasant time with no danger of being distracted by neighboring conversations.  All I have to say is café Americano et croque monsieur, or cervesa y patatas bravas, and I’m good to go.  I once wrote half a book over less than a week in joints hanging off the cliffsides of Positano.  It just gushed right out of me. 

Faulkner muddled through rarely leaving Oxford, Mississippi, my favorite philosopher Immanuel Kant barely budged from Königsberg, and Emily Dickinson basically never left her room, and they all did fine, though I still think those smart folks should have travelled more.  Dickinson’s poetry might have taken a different trajectory had she consumed a Philly cheese steak or punted on the Cam.  Kant’s belief in the tenuousness of objective reality might have been bolstered by meeting a platypus. 

As with all literary pursuits, there are prosaic travel writers who can recommend great hotels and ticketing hacks, and geniuses who happen to like a good amble.  For that, you can’t do better than Bill Bryson.  Or Paul Theroux, who I think went everywhere on the planet without ever relaxing his keen eye or joie de vivre.  Even Mark Twain, the Innocent Abroad who was anything but. 

Sorry, Professor Callard.  I’m sure you have other fine qualities, but on this issue you’re just dead wrong.