On Travel

A serious question posed to you vacation travelers: Is the going still good? The environment has changed since we first addressed the matter seven years ago (MM 11/21/16 Is The Going Still Good?) with the observation of 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."

So why the need to travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth scarcely withholds any secrets anymore, or at least not otherwise easily discoverable without all that expensive motion. For the trophies? For the bragging rights? Because it fosters some new forms of understanding? . . . .

. . . . which, as we addressed in the featured focus piece from that previous session: It may be a narcissistic fallacy of travel to imagine that one's mere passing through sets up a charmed understanding between traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension. A kind of Heisenberg Principle usually goes to work: the observation of visitors alters the behavior of the observed, sometimes in ugly ways. Theodore Roosevelt, age eleven, recorded a story in his diary of the family's grand tour in 1869. The Roosevelts tossed small pieces of cake to a crowd of Italian beggars: "We made them open their mouths and tossed cake into it." Like chickens, like pigeons in the park.

That same youngster, by the way, grew up to experience an altogether different level of travel as chronicled in River Of Doubt, the featured book in one of our pre-MM book club discussions, describing Teddy Roosevelt’s 1914 post-Presidency exploration of an undiscovered tributary of the Amazon. The number and the magnitude of the perils faced by that exploration party defies description but consider this: provisions were gone; the starving men were reduced to dynamiting the river to stun piranha; one man collecting fish, held another in his mouth; stunned fish comes around and bites off man’s tongue. Now that’s a travel experience.

Compare that to what might pass for travel today -- gargantuan white cruise ships giving birth to blue-haired ladies and others in numbers that might dwarf the entire population of the host port. Does this give rise to some charmed understanding or simply manifest commercial imperialism, like a grinning Teddy Roosevelt after an African elephant kill?

The foregoing, as you undoubtedly note, is presented as a somewhat cheeky jumping-off point to invite an honest sharing of how some personal travel experience may have shaped your life. You have a wide range of travel experiences from which to choose, from a nothing-is-expected-of-you cruise ship to a Brazilian tongue ectomy. Sometimes what’s deemed vacation is more a matter of an escape than the arrival, a short-term fix until the eventual realization one can’t really escape from oneself.

The winner seven years ago was member Bob Davis’s roots tour, featuring his solo drive in a camper back to the Ohio of his youth. He received extra credit for having documented his entire experience, applying to travel the quote by Anne Morrow’s (Charles Lindbergh’s wife) that writing is more than living for it is being conscious of living.

We might then speculate on the future need for physical travel in a world (d)evolving into a virtual phenomenon -- the advent of network communities (MM 10/31/22 The Network Community). Beyond that, why in the world would we ever need to wander around other cultures to smell the cooking if/when we could do so by mainlining the stimulus directly into the brain (MM 5/8/17 Neuralink)? Next stop, Apple Vision Pro Headset, rolling out in early 2024, with SkyGuide that can “transfer” you to space.

How about a vacation in meditation over life’s mysteries while sitting in the club garden?