The Case Against Travel?

By JoAnne Young

We all are travelers of one kind or another. 

 

Not just we humans but also those migrating birds and mountain lions, sea turtles and whales, caribou and monarch butterflies.

 

One human named Agnes Callard, a 47-year-old with a PhD in philosophy, has riled some travelers with an essay titled The Case Against Travel, published in June in the New Yorker magazine. 

 

She quotes other writers, travel contrarians such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Socrates and G.K. Chesterton, who disparage travel as narrowing the mind, as having a dehumanizing effect, and worse, as being only for those with such poverty of the imagination that they have to move around to feel. 

 

She calls much of what travelers do, such as flying to Paris, going to the Louvre and standing 15 feet in front of the Mona Lisa for about 15 seconds, nothing more than "locomotion."

She argues that more than wanting to experience something new, travelers want to be seen experiencing something new. 

 

If I am interpreting her and the other writers she uses to prove her point correctly, she seems to be saying that travelers seek to be enlightened, to do some human bonding with those who they consider as the "others." Instead, they end up not bonding but relating to them only as spectators. 

 

They view them in the abstract. In reality, the human bond they are seeking is right there at home, in feeling the presence of those “others” nearby who they traveled so far to see. 

 

When your friends return from their summer adventures, she says, they may speak of their travel as being transformative, but will you be able to detect a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Any difference at all? 

 

As much as we may want to beg to differ with Ms. Callard, her essay was thought provoking. Many of my family and friends are hardier travelers than I am, but I can count among my travels and visits and temporary living spaces a good number of locations both in this country and a few others. 

 

I am thinking about my own reasons for travel: To break out of the confines of everyday life; to explore the origins of our American culture and that of others; to experience new influences and get a view of how people become who they are. 

 

I have learned a lot about other states and their residents by spending a few hours at their Capitols, looking at the architecture of those buildings, the art they treasure, the words they display. When I can, I spend a few minutes talking to a senator, a reporter, a lobbyist or just a wanderer. Then I go to a nearby restaurant and sample its food and décor, and listen to what wait staff can tell me about life there. 

 

For me, the good that has come from travel are those standout moments I bring home in my head. They're implanted there as some bit of pleasure or peace or amusement, crafted by the feelings and experiences that have already made themselves at home. 

 

A few of those moments are these: 

 

* Kneeling in the water at low tide on Cannon Beach in Oregon on an overcast afternoon to glimpse the large pink and smaller orange sea stars clinging to the underside of large rocks with just one arm visible. It’s a sighting I had never seen before or since, and I got to share it with my daughter. 

 * Walking through Juneau, Alaska, and stopping to talk to a man with a ruddy face and a seafarer’s cap, his grandson on his shoulders. They had just sailed up the coast from California to this place that is only accessible by boat or sea plane because of the rugged terrain which surrounds it.

 

* Exploring the house of Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, peeking into a drawer in her bedroom where she stashed her poems, many of them rejected by publishers until after her death. Seeing where she wrote, where she walked, and setting a token on her gravestone in a nearby cemetery as many other devotees had done. 

 

* Sitting in Farrell’s Bar & Grill in Brooklyn with a brother-in-law who grew up in the area, and who told us stories about going into the bar as a child to fetch his grandfather because women were not allowed to darken its door at the time. And hearing fascinating tales of a firefighter who worked in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, and was thought to have died until several days later he walked back into the bar to the cheers and tears of the regulars.  

 

* Walking the several blocks where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer and his colleagues and which has now become a memorial to the black Americans who have been killed across our country by law enforcement officers whose job it is, rather, to protect and serve. 

 

We all have our memories and moments. Travel may be a status symbol for some, or a notch in a globetrotting belt, but for most of us it is memories of sights and sounds that we have long wanted to experience for ourselves. Those visits make our daydreams and thoughts come to life. 

 

Mostly I travel for inspiration. Different sights and scenery make my wheels turn counterclockwise and ideas just spring forth. I visit as many bookstores as I can to see what the local writers are publishing and what the booksellers can recommend as “must-sees” in town. 

 

One of my favorite quirky books was found in Minneapolis, a city with some of the best bookstores I’ve encountered. Things That Are by Amy Leach. I love this book. 

 

“‘We are Trappists like the creek,’ thought the raindrops as they filled the pond with fresh cloud water, or mixed with the juice of a fallen cherry, or came to rest deep in the dirt, and everywhere neglected to introduce themselves.’” 

 

So thank you to Agnes Callard for sending me on a thinking tour of my travels, and my reasons for doing so. I wish it were possible to hear about the travel adventures of sea turtles and mountain lions and butterflies. 

 

It’s not. So I will be content to hear about yours. 

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