Thinking about travel. Today I’m taking my first flight in some time. Of course, wearing a mask for almost the entire journey is a pain in the neck, but the virus lockdown seems to have made it cheaper to fly and find a hotel room. Generally, I like travel. I moved around quite a bit when younger and think it was a good learning experience. At the time, a relative teased me that visiting many different places seemed glamorous but that I must be aware it also seemed somewhat homosexual.
For many people, travelling is a way to use physical momentum and change of environment to counter forces of inertia and entropy that can take hold when bound to one place for a very long time. We tend to think of structure and domestic stability as positive things, but habit can also be deadening. The self-quarantining authorities are recommending during the current coronavirus has made many stir crazy. And a lockdown mentality might especially chafe for some, bringing to mind Hamlet’s contemptuous recommendation that Polonius have “the doors…shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in’s own house.”
One of my literature professors pointed out in a book on post-modernism and post-colonialism that international cultures only really began to interact with each other on a large scale from about 1500 onward. In literature, I think of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy about the eighteenth-century tradition of British vacationing on the European continent, what is known as the Grand Tour, and Graham Greene’s internationally themed novels and travel journalism. In movies, the series of The Trip films with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon demonstrate how travel can be a humorous palliative for middle age. And the James Bond novels and films serve as vicarious world tourism for many.
I think the lure of travel depends on your personality and life circumstances. I had a buddy who asked why he should travel when he can more easily read of distant places and watch documentaries about them. Some are driven on long journeys by “push” as well as “pull,” getting away from awkwardness at home or weariness with the status quo. Others may shy away from it out of concern they lack the sophistication or sensitivity to interact well with foreign cultures. Americans, with our sense of exceptionalism and rugged independence, may be especially shy of globe-trotting, and we are also working against the Ugly American stereotype and resentment of our foreign policies and influence. An old British Airways advertising slogan tried to mollify such concerns about culture clash: “there’s more that brings us together.”