"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though , but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing."
-----David Foster Wallace, from the essay "Consider The Lobster" in "Consider The Lobster"
5 comments:
I have this suspicion that this quote can and should impact my life, but I have no idea what this guy's talking about. Stratt, please translate for the common folk...
It's an interesting take on intrA-state tourism. . ..this desire to go and "see" things in America, like the grand canyon. The problem is that you have these pre-concieved notions you bring to the table to those experiences, which in some sense diminishes them before you even get there. Beyond that, your very presence at locations like the grand canyon becomes that of a bug on a dead thing (i.e. some expectation that isn't possibly met by the thing itself, or is marred by the fact that it's overrun by tourists and no longer a beautiful majestic canyon sitting by itself in the desert.
The quotation comes from an essay on the Maine Lobster festival. It's a hilarious read and can be found Here
maybe that last post was more obtuse than the original. He's basically saying tourists ruin what makes a place tourist worthy in the first place, esp. in large numbers.
Hey Chris,
Wandering wonderer here ...
Google's g-mail scans the content of your e-mail and picks up on key/common words. It uses that content to then suggest links you might like to check out. I guess I had sent an e-mail to a buddy about OK Computer, and up popped the link on his reply. I don't think I can tell you how to replicate this, but if you have a gmail account you might play around with it.
Anyway, just checking back at your site. Glad to see you keep posting quotes. I particularly identified with the quote from David Foster Wallace. I've had similar thoughts and experiences traveling abroad. I've sometimes wondered what our (non-economic, non-physical) effect is on a place by simply being there. Set aside the physical human footprint inherent in being somewhere, and I think of whether an individual's purely ontological being somwewhere has an effect on the ontology of the place we are - think: "does a falling tree make a sound if no one's around to hear it?"
Related to being a tourist, it seems that our wanting to be somewehere "else" - to intentionally travel from here to there - must carry with an ontological effect on the places we find ourselves. One point Wallace might be making is that though an individual's being can pale in comparison to the the ontological being of the place itself, there is no way to wholly be "a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all" and at the same time experience the place you have traveled to see. Your ontological being necessarily impacts the ontological being of the place you are. So, it is impossible not to effect the world - perhaps a small victory for the seemingly insignificant?
I agree with you. I think the complaint of the idealist is generally a beef with reality at its most unseemly. I resonate with DFW's lament, but ultimately it's just that, a lament that things ought to be different.
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