The Vanity Of Foreign Travel - A Cruise Ship To Nowhere

In Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth, the main character, Fran Dodsworth, is a hopelessly bourgeois, socially ambitious woman who convinces her husband - wealthy, secure, and happy as the founder and President of an independently produced automobile company - to sell it and travel with her to Europe.  They go from one capital to another, she looking for sophistication and the attention of royalty, and he following dutifully, longing to return to his simple, rewarding, productive life back home. 

Lewis writes: 

Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative. Actually, it is one of the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globetrotting for special purposes, it merely provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance…The Great Traveler has shot lions in Siberia and gophers in Minnesota, and played tennis with the King at Stockholm. He can give you a delightful evening discoursing on Tut's tomb and the ethnology of the Maoris.

Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily…He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.  He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all…

These are the laws of travel…It is the awful toil which is the most distressing phase of travel. If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity. These things the Dodsworths discovered, though, like most of the world, they never admitted them. 

 

Worse, as Lewis claims, is the desire “to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as [one] might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity”. 

Hermione Adams, a single woman long alone, had always wanted to travel ever since she saw pictures of Le Cafe des Deux Magots in her French reader.  When Alain Dufour came to the school as an exchange student, the case was sealed.  She would go to France as soon as possible, follow her dream, and live the life of an expatriate. 

She, unlike Fran Dodsworth, was a simple woman who had caught a glimpse of life beyond the prairie and felt that travel to Europe would be the entree to a glamourous, romantic world of fine food, elegance, and savoir faire.  Europe would not replace her Midwestern life, only nourish and embellish it. Travel would be 'elucidating'. 

Paul Theroux, American novelist and travel writer, wrote The Tao of Travel, a collection of writing from travel writers from Ibn Battuta to the present, all of whom had understood the allure of travel, its almost epiphanic character, and its magical freedom. 

Travel for Theroux was never incidental, but central.  Travelling alone, removed from family, friends, and responsibility with no one to turn to, no one to trust, and no one to provide support, confidence, or simple help - jettisoning every piece of personal baggage, cutting all social, cultural, and intimate ties - is the only way in a prescribed and predictable life to allow for discovery if not epiphany. 

You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.

Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be all alone and unencumbered…..It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people.  What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.

Travel which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion, just the opposite.  Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or foreign culture.  It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place.  Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life….What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.

Individual travel is a personal privilege.  For weeks or months at a time, one can travel on one's own, freed from domestic and professional responsibilities and so unconcerned about them, they cease to exist.  The traveler begins to see things through his own eyes, and reflect on them with a perspective unencumbered by family, home, nation, friends. Returning home, the traveler, having become solitary, independent, unattached, and guilt-free for so long can only seem strange and indifferent to his wife and children. 

At the same time such willing detachment brings home and family into relief, not with regret, but with appreciation.  

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in may respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or paying bills.

Tourism is big business, and Paris, Rome, and New York welcome millions of visitors each year.  The Eiffel Tower, the Tower of Pisa, and the Empire State Building are, despite their familiarity, perennial favorites.  Why, exactly?  The Eiffel Tower, other than an iconic image of Paris, is no more than a Victorian, early-Industrial Age construction, surprising and remarkable at the time, but only an architectural curiosity now.

The  leaning Tower of Pisa even less remarkable as a structure and insignificant as a historical moment with no particular iconic value is on most Italian tours.  The Empire State Building has historical interest as one of the important skyscrapers of the modern era, but it is of far less immediate significance and interest than the many contemporary glass towers surrounding it.

Tourism is not the same thing as travel, but Hermione didn't know the difference.  Without fully realizing it, she wanted the insights and particular vision of the traveler, but was trapped within the American dream of expansionism, always wanting more, never content with the way things are, and happy enough to recreate, fantasize, and imagine without having to understand. 

So she was betwixt and between - the unschooled, simple American who needed to leave Chillicothe, Grover's Corners, or Zenith for no other reason than to expand her horizons, see how the rest of the world lived, finally be someone other than the dowdy librarian and church goer and become the perceptive, interior, intelligent woman who knew life had to be more than the prairie, the farm, and the river. 

Vladimir Nabokov, a unique traveler and one who valued the inscription of events on memory and the importance of place and time said:

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one’s own inner live of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values

 

Theroux agrees, but adds:

Africa seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength – binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, recreating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction.  That’s why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single, troubled, landscape

Theroux writes for and about the few - those particularly educated, wise, and intellectual adventurers who find foreignness itself intriguing.  Are we humans all the same? Or are we divided and different by culture? Is their a commonality to language, some innate configuration which demands logic? Or is it simply expressive of environment, history, and unpredictable forces?  Are there common threads to humanity?

Josef Conrad answered this question in The Heart of Darkness. 'The horror...the horror', says Kurtz on his deathbed when he realizes that the savagery he has seen in the tribes deep in the African rainforest and realized in himself, is universal, the most basic, profound, and ineradicable part of human nature. 

For the many - the legions of Hermione Adams, tourists hungry for sights and sounds but with no eagerness for anything more than a visit, no interest let alone patience to unravel, unclothe, or investigate anything.  Perhaps this is a good thing - if it weren't for foreign travel, Americans would still be eating pot roast.  Amidst the glop and goo of inedible offerings in Paris, the tourist usually finds something to bring home; but for the most part, tourism is one routine drive-by incidental affair.  

Particularly now in the age of virtual reality the towers, arenas, and monuments of Europe ticked off on an all-expenses-included tour can be reproduced with absolute fidelity through AI.  There soon will be no difference between virtuality and reality. 

If she was being honest with herself, Hermione did hope to meet a count or viscount on the slopes of Gstaad or at the casinos of Monte Carlo, but once on the bus between Trocadero and the Tuileries, between lunch and dinner, she knew it would never happen. 

Nothing exciting happened on her European tour, nothing except endless train rides, on-and-off bus stops, one-night each at unremarkable hotels, and predictably oo-la-la meals that beneath the sauce and hoopla were not that much different from Dot's Kitchen. 

Like all Americans, she was happy to be 'foreign returned' and stirred up a bit of fuss at her book club and church group.  'Meet anybody interesting?', the girls hinted enviously; but soon enough the trip faded, the photo album gathered dust, and Hermione went back to business, not unhappy she traveled, but not particularly happy either. 

This in the words of one social scientist had a name - American Travel Letdown, the realization that the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, and the Danube were just things in a different place, irrelevancies, oddities remembered vaguely but without timbre, color, or tone,  Just things.

For the likes of Ibn Battuta, Nabokov, Burton, Park, or Theroux - eye-painters, philosophers, adventurers - travel was immeasurably important and central to their lives as artists and thinkers.  It offered a distance, a perspective, and insights that could never occur in familiar, predictable surroundings. 

For everyone else, it was time, effort, and money wasted.