When I arrived in France to begin a two-month sojourn (a mellifluous word that sounds more romantic than it is), I realized something about travel – it was a kind of borderline epiphany.
My stay had a specific purpose beyond tourism. Although I did get a cheap thrill out of saying I would be lolling about the south of France over the summer, I had goals. The first – purely practical – was to plant myself somewhere for the summer after the end of my short-term lease in Austria (I return in September). I chose France to work on improving my French – the second goal. And, last, I wanted to test a theory. Could I establish a short-term but permanent-feeling routine, a blend of tourism and living (finding a go-to supermarket, cooking at home, joining a gym, that sort of thing)? It was the tourism bit was what triggered the little epiphany.
Carcassonne is a well-known tourist destination about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the village outside Narbonne where I’m staying. A picturesque walled medieval city standing at the top of a low hill, it overlooks the modern town (established in the 13th century) and commands sweeping views of the surrounding Occitane landscape. It is by far the most celebrated attraction in the area and the one at the top of my to-do list.
The city is also known for the cassoulet. This hearty dish, composed of several meats, beans and foie gras, is a popular one in France, and Carcassonne is its recognized place of origin. So, lunch formed a big part of my planned visit.
During the short drive to Carcassonne, empty-headed and prone to wayward thoughts, I was struck by the sense of obligation I felt to do what I was doing. Any report on my travels would be incomplete without a visit to Carcassonne. I asked myself why. What did I expect to get out of my visit? A potentially satisfying meal – the cassoulet – was the only thing that came to mind. Being honest with myself, I had to admit to having no specific interest in Carcassonne. I expected only to find the place visually appealing, to provide an enjoyable afternoon out, an indulgent way to pass the time. In other words – cynically – I would tick a box. I could say I had been there.
Here’s how it went down. After I arrived, I struggled to navigate the little town thanks to my outdated GPS, and to find parking. Once I did park, I had a pleasant stroll through the new town just as people were escaping the office and finding seats in the suddenly bustling restaurants and cafes. The sight of the walled city from the bridge enthralled me, and did again on the short climb up to a rear entrance into the city. I wandered among other tourists throughout the cobbled streets and took everything in – the awe-inspiring beauty of the ancient construction but also the lamentable fact that everything had been converted into a tourist shop or restaurant or cafe. The day proved too hot for a hearty meal, so I skipped the cassoulet. After circumnavigating the ramparts and snapping all the usual tourist snaps, I returned to my car. Despite the heat, I didn’t start the engine right away but sat and stared. It was an hour and a half that had left me empty inside and wondering what everyone else saw that I didn’t. What was the appeal? Why the effort?
The experience rattled me. The following morning, I woke haunted by the notion of some possible meaning lost on me. Was I some kind of insensate clod? Why, in the face of this undeniably beautiful edifice, this centuries-old relic that drew throngs of tourists, did I feel nothing?
On the second morning, I woke to a frank realization. Tourism, in fact, had never truly interested me. Not tourism in the conventional sense. A mix of complacency and mental inertia had stopped me from questioning this before. In the past, I would agree to visit tourist attractions just to be congenial, while inwardly cringing at the prospect of it. I’m not talking about visits to major museums (or any good art museum – I love art museums), or the kinds of destinations that deserve their designations as wonders of the world. I’m talking about the kind of attractions that places like Carcassonne represent. Places that you might never have thought to visit had you not glanced at a brochure or seen it on a website.
But there was more to the epiphany than that. It was the recognition that my travel could excavate the unknown or unaddressed within myself. That there might be something deeper to this malaise than not having much interest in a dusty old castle. That it could, in fact, make me feel, but feel feelings that I had not been primed to expect. Maybe this was the whole point of the exalted Grand Tours of the past: travel experiences that left wanderers like Goethe with profound, life-altering revelations. Similarly, maybe this was the intent of the gap-year – time set aside to explore yourself before embarking on a fixed path. Before it got dumbed down by alcohol and Instagram. My brief visit to this remote French town was trying to teach me something, it seemed – provided I was open to learn the lesson.
I pieced it together like this. Carcassonne can only be perceived by me in the unique way I perceive it. That perception will be influenced by an incalculable number of conscious and unconscious inputs, spanning an emotional spectrum from my particular mood that afternoon (rather upbeat) to the fact that this was my first visit alone to a tourist attraction since a sudden and unexpected divorce (somewhat ill at ease). My mistake going into the visit had been to focus on getting out of it what I believed everyone else did when what I needed to get out of it was what I needed out of it. My mistake, by the way, is why all the pictures of Carcassonne you see on Instagram look the same (including mine).
As my mind turned over these initial impressions, I synchronously happened on Agnes Callard’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Case Against Travel.” While the vast majority of us believe that travel is beneficial – to the point of unassailability, Ms. Callard presents a strong case to refute this.
She begins by quoting a few respectable literary figures who challenge the fundamental belief. G.K. Chesterton, for example, wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Fernando Pessoa in his Book of Disquiet took it a bit further: “Travel is for those who cannot feel … Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.”
These strike me as subjective generalizations. There may be some truth in them but a truth shaded by the inner workings of each author’s soul and psyche – some specific influence, perhaps, that had prejudiced them against travel. Still, I could see where she was headed with this. Ms. Callard makes a very good point by writing:
“At home or abroad, one tends to avoid ‘touristy’ activities. ‘Tourism’ is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.”
Not only is this true of tourist travel itself, the same can be said about travel writing. With such a fundamental flaw at the core of its purpose, it becomes clear why travel writing is so hard to get right. While the Internet is awash with cookie-cutter articles about what to see in a certain place, the classics of travel writing fill only a small shelf.
Ms. Callard makes the point that “travel gets branded as an achievement.” By transporting yourself to increasingly exotic locales, you become a more interesting person – a process worthy of documentation, with the trophy room today for such travel achievements being Instagram.
But these aren’t travel achievements. They are tourism achievements. I had it described to me by an acquaintance who works in the tourism industry. Wealthy, educated people today are booking week-long private cruises in the Adriatic and insisting on a rigorous itinerary that takes them from one Instagramable destination to the next. Instead of exposing themselves to local food and drinks, they demand to have everything on-board they are accustomed to having at home. In the end, the experience they create for themselves is nothing more than a strenuous drill to collect postable photos. The effort itself negates the experience.
Those, like myself, who harbor a more “romantic” view of travel begin to recognize that tourism and travel may share fewer similarities than we might think. It gets complicated.
Ms. Callard proposes to define travel but offers instead a definition for what is really only a variation of travel: tourism. She defines “tourism as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting – and … misses.” This could easily be interpreted to mean that tourism aspires to what we think of as travel – that romanticized bundle of transformational and life-affirming experiences – but fails to achieve it. What Ms. Callard does is write about tourism and treat travel as not just synonymous with it but identical to it.
Travel, properly defined, should embody the legacy of classical exploration. It should contain within it an understanding that you will learn something about yourself as you absorb the travel experience. This could apply (in varying degrees) to anything – from eating your first jambalaya in New Orleans to setting your eyes for the first time on the temples of Bagan, Burma. If you snapped a picture of either and posted it to Instagram first, you’re probably not doing it right.
“The tourist is a deferential character,” according to Ms. Callard. “He outsources the vindication of his experiences to … conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this ‘openness to experience,’ is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience.” If my expectation is to get out of my visit what I assume every other visitor gets out of it, as I did in Carcassonne, then I have set myself up to feel nothing. “… To be a tourist,” says Ms. Callard, “is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count.”
If you’re a family of four or an ambitious young professional couple and all any of you want is your week or two taking in the sights, then you’re a tourist with nothing to be ashamed of. You’re not looking for a transformation; you’re looking for relaxation.
Ms. Callard continues in this vein: “The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. The traveler [my emphasis] departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements.”
The tourist does. Not the traveler.
Careful reading of Ms. Callard’s essay helped me better understand my dislike of tourism but did nothing to influence my opinion of travel.
What I have discovered is that travel opens my eyes to the possibility of learning something about myself that I might not otherwise have discovered. Travel is selfish, soulfully self-centered, contradictorily introspective. The deliberate placement of myself outside accustomed surroundings, the introduction to different people and their beliefs and conventions, the simple act of existing far away from home – the exposure to foreignness, impresses on us more than we can perhaps fully understand. Those who glimpse the “magical and profound” as Ms. Callard somewhat cynically refers to it, and who are able to capture it in writing add something sublime to that unfilled shelf of travel writing. Travel, in the end, is a justifiably selfish pursuit, one that is difficult to share during and after the fact. It is at its most selfish – and most rewarding – when done alone. The more perceptive you can be to how you respond to new places and new experiences, then the more capacity travel has to teach you more about yourself – more than staying at home could ever do.