"Two years ago, Richmond, Va., installed 17 markers delineating a slave trail, running past the sites of slave markets and a slave jail."

"A national slavery museum is being planned, said Delores McQuinn, a state legislator, who has led the slave trail project. Charleston, S.C., has moved away from its traditionally genteel approach to antebellum history to one that acknowledges the central role of slavery in the city’s development. An International African-American Museum is planned there as well and is seen as good business."

"Tourism audiences are changing," said Mary Battle, a public historian with the Avery Research Center for African-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

"My doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester, so when I was five months pregnant I decided to take one last big trip... to Mongolia."

"People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.

I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself.... I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange.... When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent....

"They stink, have rough skin and look like old dogs. No wonder they have to pay for a man."

"Men won’t touch them where they come from," said a male "sex worker," quoted in an article with a title in the form of a question that assumes a fact I didn't know was in evidence: "Why Is Female Sex Tourism Embraced By Society?" 

Via Instapundit, who says: "Female sexuality is always to be celebrated, unlike that icky and dangerous male sexuality." But that's missing something, and I'm saying that as an "old dog" — shouldn't that be bitch? — myself. If male sexuality is "icky and dangerous," how can an older woman leave the safety and comfort of her home country and travel somewhere foreign specifically for the purpose of exposing her vulnerable body — in some private, as-yet-unknown space — to this grotesque and physically stronger being? I don't see how you can "celebrate" the woman here without also celebrating the male.

What I see being celebrated is the power of money and the value of sex.

Why would a libertarian get miffed about that?

The nightmare of flying just got a little more complicated.

"The Federal Aviation Administration will allow airlines to expand passengers' use of portable electronic devices during all phases of flight, the agency announced today, but cell phone calls will still be prohibited," says a "Breaking News" email from CNN.

I'm guessing the cell phones are still prohibited because we really cannot tolerate a plane full of people yakking on their cell phones. And yet... flying on a plane is an ordeal in the toleration of other people. Those of us who are too sensitive to endure it are not on that plane, which means that if you are, you're there with a plane full of insensitive people.

I know that's not completely true. Some people are forced to fly. Or rather: everyone on any plane has some reason to be there that outweighs the unpleasantness of the experience. It just takes more for some of us than others. And now we can use iPads and laptops to watch movies and play video games and work work work. The question for any given would-be passenger is: Does that add to the pro or the con side of flying?

In the future, the planes will be full of people who are there having weighed the pros and cons under the new rule. And when you see (or think about) what that's like, you'll have to redo your own weighing of reasons to fly against the unpleasantness of the experience. Am I going to be sitting between 2 guys playing video games while someone behind me pounds away on a laptop on the tray-table attached to my seat?

ADDED: I do realize that today's rule change relates only to the takeoff and landing phases and that devices have been common on flights for a long time. The "now" in paragraph 3, above, was intended to refer to the way things have been recently and awkwardly to the new extension of freedom to use devices. As for weighing the pros and cons of the new rule: If the absence of the use of devices was a comfort, it was only a small comfort, in part of the flight. Changing the rule at least ends the pestering by flight attendants. Overall, I like the rule change. I need reading or listening material on a plane, and I don't want to have to think about or to carry the weight of a paper book to tide me over during the takeoff and landing phases. I especially don't like being woken up half an hour before landing to be told to turn off the audiobook that enabled me to fall and to stay asleep.

"Maybe you don't think you'd get much out of it, but if it's not prohibitively expensive..."

"... maybe it's worth a try just to get commenters to stop harassing you about travel," says the jackal, commenting on my disinclination to endure 8+ hours crammed in a metal tube to see how I feel when the tube poops me out somewhere other than here. That vaunted amalgam of arrogance and humiliation that is travel — I could blog about it.

My response, at the link, ends with the phrase "readers would need to pony up something like $20,000."

"Outside, I watched a farmer plow his field with yaks. The sky was a deep blue and there was a full moon."

"I'm on Mars, I thought for the umpteenth time. But Michael Jackson's 'Heal the World' was wafting over the speakers. No I realized, this was weirder than Mars. I searched for an off button. Surely, we, the four of us inside this small compartment, could agree that Michael Jackson's 'Heal the World' was unacceptable music for a journey over the Tibetan Plateau. I finally found the off button and switched it off, raising my eyebrows, expecting to be praised for this quick communal resolution to an irritation. The man across from me turned it back on. Oh, my friend, I thought. We are going to have issues. And so to the sound of 'Beat It' we rumbled across Tibet."

J. Maarten Troost, "Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation."

"Back at the market, I muse how the photos that I take invariably bring out what I think of as local and therefore interesting."

"You're not likely to find me taking a picture of the Polish guy who was standing on the street with hand extended asking for a few coins. Or of the stores along the main drag -- they have a ubiquitous face to them that could appear anywhere at all: places of cheap clothing, a few tattoo parlors, many barbers and butchers too. I like walking up one, peering into another, but my camera waits."

Weekending somewhere obscure in Ireland, Nina reveals her approach to censorship by photographic framing.

And this says something about why I don't — like Nina — put great effort into traveling to distant places. If I were in that Irish market with my camera, I would frame the discontinuities and weird juxtapositions. I'd be drawn to what would disappoint the traveler who's looking for the old world where things are authentic and true to that particular locality.

Nina's phrase is "local and therefore interesting," but what would seem interesting to me would be the inevitable intrusions of the non-local, the very things that spoil the trip for those who formed their  idea of what they would find if they expend great effort going somewhere from of photographs framed as Nina has done.

There are many photographs at the link. It's all very romantic and beautiful in the photographs. Enjoy them. They are probably more enjoyable than taking the trip yourself. But for Nina, I believe that the trip is enjoyable in large part because she is searching for photographs like that, and it's a difficult search that requires a thought and skill. It's exciting and interesting because of the effort it takes to exclude what would not be pleasant to see. I suspect that just outside each frame is something jarring, like a Nike T-shirt or a Miley Cyrus magazine cover.

Think about that before you succumb to the fantasy that travel will be beautiful. These photographs are the lure but also the set-up for disappointment when you see that it's not like that at all, even if it is some non-touristy spot like Ballina by the Lough Derg or Limerick or wherever Nina has alighted.

"A height of some fifty feet above the roofs of Rome gives me all the advantages that I could get from fifty miles of distance."

"The air so exhilarates my spirits, that sometimes I feel half inclined to attempt a flight from the top of my tower, in the faith that I should float upward," said Hilda.

"O, pray don’t try it!" said Miriam laughing. "If it should turn out that you are less than an angel, you would find the stones of the Roman pavement very hard; and if an angel, indeed, I am afraid you would never come down among us again.” 

This young American girl was an example of the freedom of life which it is possible for a female artist to enjoy at Rome. She dwelt in her tower, as free to descend into the corrupted atmosphere of the city beneath, as one of her companion doves to fly downward into the street;— all alone, perfectly independent, under her own sole guardianship, unless watched over by the Virgin, whose shrine she tended; doing what she liked without a suspicion or a shadow upon the snowy whiteness of her fame. The customs of artist life bestow such liberty upon the sex, which is elsewhere restricted within so much narrower limits; and it is perhaps an indication that, whenever we admit women to a wider scope of pursuits and professions, we must also remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become an insufferable restraint on either maid or wife.

From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Marble Faun."

Listening to Oliver.

Do you remember Oliver?

His clean-cut good looks and soaring tenor voice were the perfect vehicle for the uptempo single entitled "Good Morning Starshine" from the pop/rock musical "Hair," which reached #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1969, sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the R.I.A.A. a month later. Later that fall, a softer, ballad single entitled "Jean" (the theme from the Oscar-winning film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) bested his previous effort by one, reaching #2 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. Written by longtime beatnik poet Rod McKuen, "Jean" also sold over one million copies, garnering Oliver his second gold disc in as many months.

This kind of recording is the kind of thing that I rejected at the time as commercial/mainstream/square/cornball, but I'd recently rediscovered "Good Morning Starshine" and found it quite beautiful, enough to look him up in Wikipedia just now and enough to make me add "Jean" alongside "Good Morning Starshine" in my iTunes.

And remember Rod McKuen? Remember when people loved him and then the cultural elite delivered the message that you're supposed to hate him?

Frank W. Hoffmann, in Arts and Entertainment Fads, described McKuen's poetry as "tailor-made for the 1960s [...] poetry with a verse that drawled in country cadences from one shapeless line to the next, carrying the rusticated innocence of a Carl Sandburg thickened by the treacle of a man who preferred to prettify the world before he described it."

Philosopher and social critic Robert C. Solomon described McKuen's poetry as "sweet kitsch," and, at the height of his popularity in 1969, Newsweek magazine called him "the King of Kitsch."

Writer and literary critic Nora Ephron said, "[F]or the most part, McKuen's poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly." Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said, "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet."

Wow! Listen to the hate.

"'Listen to the Warm,' remember that?" I ask Meade, as I look for an Amazon link that I thought would go amusingly on the words "Listen to the hate," above. "You can't even buy that now." But I remember high school kids who clutched that book and felt lucky to have it. What other poetry books — in our lifetime — have experienced that kind of young love?

Meade says, "There was an audio," and you can still buy that.  And you can buy endless other works of poetry in audio form, albeit with music (or something approaching music) supporting the poetic verbiage so you don't have to think "poetry."

We're reveling this morning in "Good Morning Starshine"...

My love and me as we sing our
Early morning singin' song

And "Jean"...

Jean, Jean, roses are red
All the leaves have gone green
And the clouds are so low
You can touch them, and so
Come out to the meadow, Jean
Jean, Jean, you're young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will, to the top of the hill
Open your arms, bonnie Jean
Till the sheep in the valley come home my way

Meade says, "What'd he say? Till the sheep come home? Why not till the cows come home?"

I say that old Rod avoids clichés, at which point the first line of the song repeats, "Jean, Jean, roses are red," and we laugh.

And all of the leaves have gone green
While the hills are ablaze with the moon's yellow haze
Come into my arms, bonnie Jean
Jean, you're young and alive!!

If you're listening to the Oliver recording, you won't question those 2 exclamation points.

Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will to the top of the hill
Come into my arms, bonnie Jean

Superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly....

"What's that line," Meade asks "'Come out of your half dream...'?" I'm reciting the lyrics and Meade has free-associated, via "dream," to "Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream...." All neural pathways lead to Dylan (chez Meadhouse). I see I did put that CD into iTunes, and Meade sings along:

Ain’t no reason to go in a wagon to town
Ain’t no reason to go to the fair
Ain’t no reason to go up, ain’t no reason to go down
Ain’t no reason to go anywhere

"See that's your argument against travel," Meade says. There's no reason to go anywhere, and when you stay where you are — lost in a dream — time passes slowly. It's as close as we can get to immortality.

"No place on earth celebrates the loogie quite like China does."

"At any given moment in China, there are millions of people hawking enormous globs of phlegm and expelling them in great cascading arcs until they splatter on streets and sidewalks. It’s done for medicinal reasons, a way of expelling bad elements from the body. The government has observed that westerners find the habit strange and more than a little icky and so they’ve undertaken a campaign to stifle the spitting. I can only hope that they fail. Having grown up in a loogie-sensitive culture, to suddenly encounter a nation of hurling spitballs is one of those up-is-down, black-is-white experiences that periodically makes traveling so gratifying. I should note that I mean that in the broad, philosophical sense and not as an endorsement of spitballs and the like."

Said Maarten Troost in 2008 in an interview about his then-newest book "Lost on Planet China," which I'm just noticing today along with his now-newest book "Headhunters on My Doorstep: A True Treasure Island Ghost Story" and his 2006 book "Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu."

As you may know, I'm addicted to listening to audiobooks to get to sleep. (I use this small under-pillow speaker so Meade doesn't have to hear it.) I have about 100 audiobooks, but only about 10 of them are really any good for falling asleep. I've listened to some of the books hundreds of times because they work so well for me, for various reasons. I need a gentle voice. Fiction never works because it's always read dramatically on these recordings and because if you drift away from the thread of the story and come back it's hard to reconnect. It needs to be interesting sentence by sentence and also out of context. One of the books that has worked — over and over — is Troost's "The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific."

Looking for some new sleepable books, I saw there were 3 other books — with the same narrator — and I bought them all.

The quote at the top of the post might remind you of the chapter about China in David Sedaris's new book "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls," which I also use, in audiobook form, for sleeping, even though its usefulness for that purpose is undercut by the musical bumpers between chapters and, in at least one chapter, noise from a live audience. Unlike Troost, Sedaris isn't enigmatically bemused about phlegm:

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think it’s best just to get it out,” a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it’s disgusting that a Westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

“Well, it’s not for sentimental reasons,” I told her. “We don’t hold on to our snot forever. The handkerchief’s mainly a sanitary consideration.”

Rainbow seen from the vantage point of my desk while writing about not traveling.

"If this video doesn't inspire you to plan a trip, nothing will."

Buzzfeed offers this "Facts That Will Make You Want To Travel." Since questioning traveling is a big theme on this blog, I'm going to embed this before watching it. I'll get back to you on whether it consigns me to the category Buzzfeed considers uninspirable.



UPDATE: Second-by-second reaction.

0:02 I realize I have seen this video before.

0:12 I've seen reports of those "studies" and am skeptical. People misjudge how much buying, say, clothing will make them happy, but they also may misjudge how much happiness they got from a trip. The strains of traveling are over, and they are now nurturing the memory they made. What's really being compared are 1. material objects that you have in your possession and come to view as not such a big deal anymore and 2. past events that are only in memory and can therefore be massaged into a form you enjoy. This is testament to the power of the mind and the value of the intangible possession that is the past.

0:16 That music thinks it can juice me up. Instead it makes me more aware that I am watching propaganda. And this is propaganda for the travel industry. It must convince me to drop money into things that won't last — like the $300 shoes that I'll "eventually forget about." Yeah, but meanwhile, I'm always going to need some shoes. They're not just for the purpose of memory-making. And: 1. Money saved not buying expensive shoes doesn't have to be thrown into travel. 2. For $300, I could buy, instead of expensive shoes, a pair of shoes, a skirt, and 2 tops or some other combination of useful wearable things that will make daily life comfortable and nice. 3. I actually do have some happy memories of specific shoes, in fact, only yesterday I was contemplating a particular kind of shoe that we wore circa 1960 that I'd love to find today.

0:21 I don't need to spend $300 to gaze at a sunset over a beautiful landscape. I can walk or bike to many beautiful vantage points, and I can drive an hour or less and get to really scenic places. If I'd spent money and time getting to somewhere farther away, would I be more likely or less likely to arrive at the elated expression seen on that woman's face? I think a less planned and more subtle experience might produce greater joy. But the contrast made in the video is to $300 sneakers. That's not the relevant comparison.

0:31 "A short trip will make you feel just as happy." Yeah, that's the argument against travel! Go for a walk in your own town or to the nearby state parks. You don't have to make a big deal about it.

0:33 Those people look like they could be enjoying sitting out on Union Terrace, having a drink while the sun sets over Lake Mendota. We love to walk there.

0:39 This shows that what is important are relationships with other people. Travel is presented as a means to that end, but there are obviously many other means. And there's a correlation-is-not-causation problem with "Regular travellers get along with people better." Maybe people who avoid travel do so because they don't get along with other people. Those who love interacting with other people may go in for travel because one of the stresses of travel isn't so stressful for them. You can't necessarily infer that traveling will improve your ability to get along with other people. I'm picturing a crowded plane with the usual annoyances.

0:46 Here we see how nice it is to have an intimate partner in life. What's the connection to travel? I see they are in a car. Meade and I are often in a car together. It's always nice, around town or off on some longer trip. But the surtitle is trying to nudge us to think couples have sex more if they go on a trip. Sex — or some other "intimacy" — is the end. Travel is offered as the means. That strikes me as a bit pathetic.

0:51 Another argument in favor of having someone to love. This is classic advertising propaganda. Put the product with something else that's good.

1:05 Oh, great. Che Guevara. I should travel because Che Guevara. Blech. He "found himself." Do you seriously think your self is out there somewhere you need to travel to find?

1:11 Monet didn't travel to Argenteuil. He lived there. Relocating your home isn't travel.

1:16 "The ticket is usually the only big cost." Oh! The money we have spent in hotels and restaurants. That's where you hemorrhage money.

1:19 "A massage in Bali is $6." Why the hell would you spent all that money and time going to Bali and then lie around with your eyes closed and have a passive experience that you can get at home? Yeah, it's more than $6 at home, but why'd you go to Bali? And do you really want to extract the pleasure of a massage from someone you are exploiting economically? The argument the video is making here is that you should give a lot of your money to the airlines because they can take you to places where the people will sell themselves super-cheap. How about avoiding the (terrible) airlines and spending the money in your hometown, on people who are your neighbors, who contribute to your community, and are asking a fair price for their work?

1:32 Eh. I'm smart enough.

1:37 "It's time to plan a trip." Planning. I don't like planning. I like spontaneous. Make an equivalent video about living spontaneously in the present. Won't that bring more happiness and intimacy, and won't you be more likely to find yourself and to get along without spending too much money? I think so.

"There is something deeply beautiful about how Mule is living."

"Just read through his Facebook page to see how much people admire his deliberate wanderings and his simple, poetic insights. Many of the things he says about development, the 'Megatropolis,' and balance sound almost prophetic. It's especially captivating to hear him talk about his way of life as a place in and of itself. 'These mules and the way that we are living is a place. It's got its own magic, there's no doubt about it. We are protected and guided. I'm out there on the side of the road, with cars coming at us, and there is something protecting and guiding us. This place has got its rules. You only take what you need, and you give your hope and your faith to this place. It's a great place to be.'"

From an article in The Atlantic called "There Is a Man Wandering Around California With 3 Mules."

How can he be offering himself as an example of how to live? How many people wandering around with mules would it take before it would no longer be true that — as the article states — "It’s rare to find places where mules are explicitly prohibited by law"?

Wisconsin, September.

A photograph from Sunday — when it was overcast and cool — that I was motivated to pull out of the camera by my own comment, dropped in the post about the man who fell or was pushed off a cliff in Glacier National Park:

When we went to Glacier, I was too afraid to hike there. You have these fantastic views, but then you can't enjoy them.

One more reason not to travel: The gentler landscapes of Wisconsin are more beautiful, because they don't force you to think about dying.

There's a human scale to Wisconsin. It feels humane. The West is dramatic, and I have enjoyed many trips though those landscapes, including Death Valley, the national park named to confront you with its hostility.

Why do we seek extreme experiences, when the subtleties of our normal lives are so close by? Why would we ever want to leave their sweet embrace? Ultimately, death will drag us away from the places we love, but why do we torment ourselves with those experiments in exile we call travel?

"This one here is the original sinsemilla, Bob Marley's favorite. And this one here is the chocolate skunk. It's special for the ladies."

Pot tourism in Jamaica, modeled on those wine tours people do in northern California.

Here, in Jamaica's verdant central mountains, dreadlocked men escort curious visitors to a farm where deep-green marijuana plants grow out of the reddish soil. Similar tours are offered just outside the western resort town of Negril, where a marijuana mystique has drawn weed-smoking vacationers for decades...

"I can get stronger stuff at home, but there's something really special about smoking marijuana in Jamaica. I mean, this is the marijuana that inspired Bob Marley," said a 26-year-old tourist from Minnesota who only identified herself as Angie as she crumbled some pot into rolling paper.

I have a problem generally with traveling to foreign countries. Is this what they mean by broadening the mind? Isn't it mind-expanding enough to consume the powerful Minnesota marijuana while playing Bob Marley records and contemplating the man who no longer lives anywhere in his natural habitat? Do people from Jamaica journey to Minnesota to think about Prince? (And he's still around. You might entertain the hope of actually seeing him.)

My mind is already sufficiently expanded to contemplate Bob Marley solely by reading about him and remembering hearing his music, and it's also expanded enough to imagine how bad I would feel getting near criminal activity in a foreign country.

I picture: "He was a 20-year-old American boy, up against a system he didn't understand, spoken in a language he couldn't speak...." Can you handle your legal problems in the language of Jamaica?



Yes, of course marijuana is still illegal in Jamaica. Here's another quote from Breezy, the Jamaican pot farmer quoted in the post title:

"The government needs to free up marijuana soon, man, because it's a natural thing, a spiritual thing.... And the tourists love it."

Ah, but what sort of bland old rule-abiding travelers would clog up the place, ruining the ambiance, if it weren't a crime? What's marijuana without the transgressive edge?

A new "Dictionary of Received Ideas."

I've been threatening to write a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas" for years — as clicking on the "Dictionary of Received Ideas" tag will prove — so a reader sent me the link to this new New Yorker piece, by Teju Cole, which is exactly that, beginning with an explanation of the original "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues," by Gustave Flaubert:

What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.

The great thing about pinning down these things is that now, anyone serving up the received idea can be forced to acknowledge that their insight is totally stale. If the book isn't written however, you're forced to say things like: If I were writing a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas," I would put [whatever you just said] next to [name the topic that had come up in conversation]. For example, to draw on a topic discussed earlier today on this blog: Travel. My entry for "Travel" would be: It broadens the mind. 

ADDED: Here is my collection, gathered from old posts. I could generate many more using my tags, but here are the 11 entries I've literally said belong in a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas," arranged alphabetically:

Action: When referring to the government, assert that it shouldn't be taken "unilaterally."
Alito: refer to him as Scalito.
Blackmun: Quote "Poor Joshua!"
Barbie: Imagine how she'd look if her proportions matched those of a real woman.
Contradiction: If accused of contradiction, quote Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Shorter form: say you "contain multitudes."
David Brooks: Impressed by the crease in Barack Obama's pants.
Federal Jurisdiction: Arcane.
Mark Madoff: Hanged himself with a dog leash.
Opposed: Always add "unequivocally."
Presidential nominating conventions: Be sure to use the phrase "tightly scripted."
Weather: When cold, make wry comment about global warming.

NOTE: The entry for "Action" was written in 2004. It would need to be updated to account for the Obama years: 

Action: When referring to the government, assert that it shouldn't be taken "unilaterally." If desired action can only be taken unilaterally, say that your opponents are "obstructionist."

The "Contradiction" entry should have "see 'Consistency,' and there should be an entry:

Consistency: "The hobgoblin of little minds." Emerson said that.

"They're not from here; they're tourists... They don't even speak English. They were very confused. "

"They had no idea how they wound up on the bridge," said the cop.

"I don't know how that would happen," said tourist Mike Norton to ABC. "They give you a little training before. They tell you don't take any bridges. I don't know what would possess you to take the bridge!"

Meanwhile: "Lost Tourist assumes all these people are in the wrong place not the other way around."

The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel...

I've been looking into the philosophy of travel, and I'm trying to get beyond the psychology of travel. It's not an easy journey, but at least I don't have to go through a metal detector and TSA patdown, and I can surround myself with >4 oz. glasses of whatever liquids I like. Here's the first substantial thing I found, a March 2000 essay by Pico Iyer: "Why we travel."

Let's see how far I can get on this leg of my journey. Iyer begins:

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more....

See? This is mostly psychology. What motivates us to go. (And I really don't believe people travel in order to spread their wealth to places that are relatively poor. Just give to charity. Or does he mean that we benefit the less fortunate by inflicting our physical presence upon them?)

Next Iyer cites an essay by George Santayana called, “The Philosophy of Travel” that stresses the work of travel.

Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship — both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. 

I'd rather avoid hardship, but I'm sure I could find it somewhere in my own town — I could sit in on criminal trials or volunteer at the respite center — but I'd be ashamed to be satiating a personal need of mine.

Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Do you really see more clearly because you've traveled to faraway places? Have you spent much time in the worst neighborhoods of your own town? In order to travel to foreign countries, you might endure hardships of your own and you must spend a fair amount of money. These personal sacrifices of yours don't do anything for other people, and they incline you toward pleasures that will compensate, which seems to be the opposite direction from compassion. But some people do go to places where things really will be uncomfortable:

When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

How many of us travel to gawk at poor people? How many of those of us who might consider traveling to gawk at poor people have difficulty understanding poverty from merely reading about it? If you do travel to Port-au-Prince to see women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, and they question why you are watching them, be sure to say, I have come here to witness this to shake myself out of my complacent abstractions and to gain wisdom. Look at that scene in your mind. It's not too abstract, is it? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?

But admit it: That's not the vacation you'd take! You might do that if it was your job — as a writer or photographer — but you're not going to spend your money to heighten your wisdom and compassion that way, are you? You're going somewhere else, somewhere you think will be amusing or uplifting, aren't you? Pico Iyer goes on to talk about less hardship-ridden trips, and he emphasizes getting outside of oneself:

On the most basic level, when I'm in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

Are not these all things you could achieve near home? You have lunar spaces within you, yet you need to go to Iceland to visit them? Why not sit in your room for an hour with your eyes closed, listening to classical music? Or walk to the nearest vantage point for the next sunset and gaze upon it? How much money would you save? $5,000? $10,000? Give it to charity! Now, was my prescription for your soul better or worse than Iyer's recommendation that you go to Iceland and Tibet? As for his Thailand recommendation, there's always a bar down the street. Pick a spot in the dangerous side of town.

Iyer quotes Albert Camus saying "what gives value to travel is fear." Iyer paraphrases "fear" as "disruption... (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide." Do you accept that paraphrase? If that's the value of travel, are you really a traveler (or must you concede you're only a tourist)? Maybe you'll say you travel for disruption but not for actual fear, other than tiny first-world fears, like fear of flying, fear of having to navigate in an environment where not everything is in English, and fear of unfamiliar foods and faces. If you really are traveling for fear, are there no better ways to pursue fear, ways closer to home? In the old days people traveled for fear — fear of starving if they didn't go looking for food, fear of murderous enemies who were moving in on their home territory. That's old-school travel, and you know damned well you are not traveling like that. You're spending your extra money to take on circumscribed fear-stimulating circumstances. Why not go for a walk late at night in the bad part of your own town? Too dangerous?

And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. 

And I'm blogging this essay in search of even better questions.

I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. 

Like the Californian assumption that there are parts of California that you should avoid? Forbes's list of cities with the most stolen cars is dominated, year after year, by Californian cities. Why did Iyer have these assumptions in the first place? Why does his California have such an inane meaning? If you have to go to Paraguay to disrupt that, I wonder about the quality of your mind. And yet somehow you have enough money to pay for a trip to Paraguay, to learn — what? — that life is gritty? That there is crime and poverty?

And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families -- to become better Buddhists -- I have to question my own too-ready judgments.

You found that out by traveling to Thailand? How? That's something you learn from reading about it, not by going there, unless you yourself are a sex tourist. One answer to the Why Travel? question is: You travel to take advantage of poorer people. No one writes that in an essay. But Iyer is almost saying: Travel to see other travelers taking advantage of poorer people... because it will make you a better, wiser, more compassionate person. Why not read about problems like this and give your money to charities that try to help unfortunate people? His answer seems to be because it's about developing his mind. But shouldn't his mind already be developed past that point?

Iyer says that on return from some places — he mentions Southeast Asia — he's felt that he "was in love." Travel is a love affair. That's his metaphor. If so, staying home is monogamy, it's where the depth is, and where the thrill is too, if you have the depth yourself.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can't quite speak the language, and you don't know where you're going, and you're pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you're left puzzling over who you are and whom you've fallen in love with....

Or is it more like being a stalker boyfriend of someone who does not and will never love you? Iyer makes light of what the tourist is to the people of the visited country:

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I'll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

What happened to the love affair metaphor? That is not love. And why are you wheeling out the cheerful examples? What about the Luxor massacre (which took place 3 years before Iyer wrote this essay)? That's the most extreme exemplification of the hostility of the traveled-upon, but think of everything between that and some imagined affable Japanese person who thinks you're just a bit silly. Where's the love? A real love affair has love on both sides. The love Iyer talks about is like the love a teenager feels for a pop idol after the concert. You cannot enter that idol's life. It's an illusion. Find someone real to love. Once you get that far, Iyer's love metaphor makes the argument for staying home.

Iyer writes about many travel writers, and that's what he is too, a travel writer. That means he's not making money doing one thing, then spending some of those earnings on travel. He travels as part of making money, and the insight he gains is not merely for developing his mind — as he argues in his essay — it's for writing about the development of the mind (and festooning the inward reflection with colorful pictures of things the readers have not seen). But what about the rest of us? We could sit home reading these travel writers, who've taken on the expense and the hardship of travel, and we could develop our mind through reading and thinking and sojourning around home.

Iyer gets around to the Thoreau quote — "I have travelled a good deal in Concord" — which we were just talking about on this blog last month (on the topic of the distinction between a tourist and a traveler). Iyer throws in Emerson too: "traveling is a fool's paradise." Iyer argues by paraphrase. What Thoreau and Emerson really do is "insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it." Now, the sleight of hand:

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also -- Emerson and Thoreau remind us -- have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center....

Home really is superior, but somehow you need to leave home to understand that. But what if you already understand that? Then, why should you travel? And I mean why should you travel if you are not a travel writer, gathering new material?

And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

The trip that never ends is home. 

Why don't those who advocate locavore cooking and native plants in gardening...

... also oppose traveling to foreign places?

Once you make it a matter of principle that we should eat and garden within our local environment of plants and animals, shouldn't you recognize yourself as an animal, belonging properly to your area, and refrain from sojourns to exotic places? Perhaps you ought to restrict yourself to a walkable radius?

This post has 2 points:

1. To notice the incompleteness of the ideology of ideologues.

2. To explore the philosophy of travel.

ADDED: What would be the word for moving about only locally, the word to correspond to "locavore"? Shouldn't it be locomotive? According to the OED, "locomotive" is composed of the Latin locō (the ablative of locus, which means "place") and motivus (which means "motive" or that which causes motion). 

"Locavore" is not in the OED, but I wonder what the "a" is doing in that word. Wikitionary shows the etymology as "From loca- by analogy with local, location, locomotive, locus, and so on, and -vore by analogy with carnivore, herbivore, and so on. Coined by Jen Maiser, Jessica Prentice, Sage Van Wing, and DeDe Sampson, co-founders of the 'Locavores' Web site." Was it ignorance of Latin roots or fear of being taken to be loco (i.e., crazy)?

"Can you start a post and thread on the adverse economic and environmental impact of pets?"

Asked Phaedrus in the comments to "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."

The same tree huggers that yammer on and on about the environment allow their pets to use everyone else property, public and private as a restroom for their animal. Human waste has to be treated under all kinds of regulatory requirements. Pets are allowed to deposit equivalent waste at will wherever as if they are wild animals which they aren't. And don't get me started on what it takes to feed them, the grain, meat etc. You could feed a lot of starving people using the grain that goes into pet food.

Consider this that post. And let me also call attention to my 2010 post "If you really believed in global warming, you would turn off your air conditioning," which had an addendum with a list of 6 more things people should do to demonstrate actual belief in the coming calamity:

1. Your weight should be at the low end of normal, indicating that you are not overconsuming the products of agriculture.

2. You should not engage in vigorous physical exercise, as this will increase your caloric requirements. You may do simple weight-lifting or calisthenics to keep in shape. Check how many calories per hour are burned and choose a form of exercise that burns as few calories as possible.

3. Free time should be spent sitting or lying still without using electricity. Don't run the television or music playing device. Reading, done by sunlight is the best way to pass free time. After dark, why not have a pleasant conversation with friends or family? Word games or board games should replace sports or video games.

4. Get up at sunrise. Don't waste the natural light. Try never to turn on the electric lights in your house or workplace. Put compact fluorescent bulbs in all your light fixtures. The glow is so ugly that it will reduce the temptation to turn them on.

5. Restrict your use of transportation. Do not assume that walking or biking is less productive of carbon emissions than using a highly efficient small car. Do not go anywhere you don't have to go. When there is no food in the house to make dinner, instead of hopping in the car to go to the grocery store or a restaurant, take it as a cue to fast. As noted above, your weight should be at the low end of normal, and opportunities to reach or stay there should be greeted with a happy spirit.

6. If you have free time, such as a vacation from work, spend it in your home town. Read library books, redo old jigsaw puzzles, meditate, tell stories to your children — the list of activities is endless. Just thinking up more items to put on that list is an activity that could be on the list. Really embrace this new way of life. A deep satisfaction and mental peace can be achieved knowing that you are saving the earth.