“They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea,” said Horace, the Roman lyric poet. Think about where you are right now. Do you want to leave? Do you want to see more of that world, and less of this one? Do you think travel broadens your perspective?
“Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. MeTravel is a great distraction. It seduces you and me to believe we’re experienced, but it gets us nowhere. Except over there.
“I got a flat tire,” is nothing to brag about. “I got a flat tire in Istanbul.” See the difference? Look over there. Travel is a mawkish inflation of space — the distance between you and the place you call home. MeTravel is a enormously overrated shared social deception. The expectation, the platitude, the excuse that this kind of travel expands your soul is folly. YWhile your soul flies away in a shallow romance, travel becomes pretense with luggage.
While your soul flies away in a shallow romance, travel becomes pretense with luggage.
At some point in time when we were short of transport, travel may have broadened the mind minimally — when, in the course of a day, our lives were limited to a mile of family and neighbors. We all went to the same church and shopped at the same stores. Not so much anymore.
Here, where I live, in Southern California, five miles to my west — in Santa Ana — 70% of the population considers Spanish their native tongue. Another 5 miles away — in Westminster — lives the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam. Two miles to the west — in Newport Beach — Saudi princes negotiate. Three miles to the North — on the Loma Ridge — Chinese. I can see Mormons, Venezuelans, Russians, Armenians, Pakistanis, Koreans, and melaleucas blooming from my front porch. If I need exotic experiences, I walk around the block.
To travel, said David Foster Wallace, “is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you.” We pad our legacy with locations, the belief in travelism — the dogma that in order to achieve fulfillment, a person needs to put on mileage — has become our gospel.
There are people who can’t wait to tell me where they’ve traveled — as if it has anything to do with who they are or what they do or what I care about. They ask me where I plan to go this summer. I say around the block. They think I’m kidding, but they’re the joke. They travel to find meaning, but instead come home with self-agrandizing words and burned resources. They consume. They take. They brag about it.
It’s a vacant proposition, this thing they call travel. It narrows the mind and flattens the soul. If you want to find yourself — if you want experience — stay where you are and look around you. The rest will follow.
— Nathan Callahan
