Why We Travel

13:21Vinson Cunningham:The squawker, c 'est moi, precisely. I honk, you honk. Yeah. We all honk. So I think what McClanahan is doing in part is to say, you know, rather than thinking that we're so great and looking down on everyone else, What if we said, yes, we are tourists and the way that we want to travel and to tour is to try to learn something new about the world, about ourselves? I mean, these are not – the funny thing to me is that these are not new ideas. These are actually very old ideas. But it's a kind of reframing. You know, she says, because of her travels, the new tourist is inoculated against anyone who might try to convince her to hate or look down on people who look different from her, who speak a language other than her own, who pray to a different god, or who happen to live on the other side of a border.

14:02Vinson Cunningham:So that's a political statement and that is actually very similar to a kind of moral idea of travel that has been going on for many hundreds of years. That travel can expose you to the other, can make you understand that we are all part of a shared world, can make you question your own customs and prejudices and can leave you enlargened.

14:28in a minute who was the old traveler and who is the new tourist critics at large we'll be right back

14:48Vinson Cunningham:Is Wuthering Heights really a love story? Should you be afraid of Virginia Woolf? And most importantly, is Mr Darcy handsome enough to tempt you? This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer. And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer. In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved. We reveal their secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books. We show how they came into being, why they matter and how they changed the world. The deeper we go, the weirder the questions.

15:24Vinson Cunningham:Is George Orwell's 1984 on some level a comedy? Is Dracula the Freddie Mercury of horror? And why do so many literary honeymoons go wrong? Whether you're a committed book nerd or just curious about the history of ideas, The Secret Life of Books is the podcast for you.

15:49Alexandra Schwartz:What we've been talking about just makes me think about how much new ideas about travel end up really being about new ideas about ourselves, like identity. You know, the one that we don't want to think about is the colonial identity. I am here to plant a flag and whatever, add glory to X empire and discover various peoples. Down to the sort of perhaps self-enrichment, eat, pray, love. I am here. I am traveling to learn something new about myself, to project something about myself onto a new landscape. And this thing that we're trying to define now, the new tourist who sort of perhaps is building a larger and more global identity as a way of understanding things outside of themselves.

16:43Alexandra Schwartz:But this always happens, I think, through literature. Usually literature is a place that we build identities where we sort of add to our understanding of the eye. Do you guys have favorite travel narratives that have done this? Do any of those come to mind?

16:58Vinson Cunningham:I have almost too many.

17:00Naomi Fry:You start and then I'll go. Okay. Are you sure, Nomi? Yeah, yeah. No, of course, of course.

17:07Alexandra Schwartz:That's our podcast, isn't it? You start and then I'll go. Yeah. That's kind of the rhythm.

17:10Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. I mean, I just have so many because, Vincent, you just put that so beautifully. It's about, of course, literature is about the construction of the eye, but it's also about, if I may, the E-Y-E. What has the eye seen on its travels and what can it bring back to you, readers sitting by your own hearth? That's right. Don't you want to see what I've seen? That's right. So like, you know, we could begin with Marco Polo name still shouted in swimming pools across the English speaking world and perhaps beyond it. I mean, this is a Venetian from the 13th century whose memoirs still influence the way that we see travel.

17:46Vinson Cunningham:You know, one thing I love about Marco Polo and his book, The Travels of Marco Polo, is that he did not write it. This other guy wrote it. This romance writer, Rustichello da Pisa.

18:00Alexandra Schwartz:Rustichello.

18:01Vinson Cunningham:Rustichello. Not Rustichello. Yeah, Rustichello himself wrote down Marco Polo's travels. He and his family were, you know, they went on the Great Silk Road. They went from Venice to Asia. They hung out at the court of the Kublai Khan. It was all very exciting and all very new and impressive. And then at some point, Marco Polo was in jail with Rustichello da Pisa, who wrote up his travels and we are still reading them today. I mean, personally, for me, the era of great travel writing, and I'm talking about the West. I mean, yes, I have dabbled in Basho and his beautiful stories of traveling around Edo-era Japan.

18:38Alexandra Schwartz:Yes, beautiful.

18:39Vinson Cunningham:Absolutely gorgeous.

18:40Alexandra Schwartz:Listening to a frog plop into a pond. Exactly.

18:43Vinson Cunningham:Mixed in with haiku. I mean, can't recommend it highly enough. It's exquisite. But my own tastes run a bit more to arrogant Europeans who like have to reckon with not knowing everything and also being kind of disappointed by what they've seen. I just want to talk briefly, if I may, about Francis Bacon, sir, who wrote a very early essay called Of Travel, early essay in the genre, telling people what they should do. And so here's what Francis Bacon says that you should do when you go somewhere. First, the traveler, he, because it was a he at that point generally, must have some entrance into the language before he goeth.

19:20Vinson Cunningham:Then he must have such a servant or tutor as knoweth the country. Okay, so you want to go with a guide. Let him carry with him also some card or book describing the country where he traveleth. Let him keep also a diary. Let him not stay long in one city or town. So he's basically saying move around. Get to know the local place. Go with someone who knows. Speak the language. You know, get some recommendations before you go so you can actually get the genuine experience. And I think it's that thing, the genuine experience, the travelers.

19:49Alexandra Schwartz:The real. Yes.

19:50Vinson Cunningham:the travelers are after.

19:51Naomi Fry:I think for me, the kind of the 19th century, either American abroad in the continent or a Britain abroad in the continent, for me, that's like, oof, I just like have always loved it, you know? And it can be, there are like actual travelogues. So there's like Mark Twain's The Innocence Abroad. A total Stone Cold classic. 1869, where, you know, it's a group of dummy Americans going to Europe, but also to the Holy Land on a ship going to Spain and then to Morocco. So it's a classic problematic, quote unquote, example of travel writing. But of course, it was a different time.

20:42Vinson Cunningham:Well, can I share one thing from Innocence Abroad? So The Innocence Abroad was published in 1869. And one thing that I dearly love about it is that it's a satiric account. And what it's satirizing, more often than not, are the travelers themselves. Totally. I think that's why it stands up as a classic. Because the experience of travel is often excruciating. A ship gets quarantined and you're stuck. You know, people are swarming you and trying to sell you stuff. Like here, for instance, right outside Naples, Twain is stuck in this town and he's describing what happens. He says, they seize a lady's shawl from a chair and hand it to her and charge a penny.

21:20Vinson Cunningham:They open a carriage door and charge for it. Shut it when you get out and charge for it. They help you to take off a duster, two cents. Brush your clothes and make them worse than they were before, two cents. Smile upon you, two cents. Bow with a lick spittle smirk, hat in hand, two cents. So he's describing, yes, the obnoxious locals, a classic trope. It's a meeting.

21:39Naomi Fry:Nobody comes out unscathed, you know, because it's Twain. So obviously, yeah, and I was going to read something about Tangier. Oh, please do. You know, it's sort of like it's basically he's describing the desire of the American travelers to get to a place that is completely different from what they know, you know, which is kind of like an age old kind of yearning of the traveler, right? And maybe especially the Western traveler coming to foreign parts. We wanted something thoroughly and uncompromisingly foreign. Foreign from top to bottom. Foreign from center to circumference. Foreign inside and outside and all around.

22:21Naomi Fry:Nothing anywhere about it to dilute its foreignness. Nothing to remind us of any other people or any other land under the sun. And lo, in Tangier we have found it. Here is not the slightest thing that ever we have seen, save in pictures. And we always mistrusted the pictures before. We cannot anymore. Yeah, I think it really pinpoints that yearning for otherness, which, you know, overtly animated travel in the past and now perhaps still animates travel, but with the grain of salt of kind of foreknowledge, right?

22:56Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, I think that this has a lot to do with this issue of identity, especially when it comes to America, where it takes on this sort of especially strong and like yearning characteristic. Twain's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson was famously like in his essay, Self-Reliance, is famously anti-travel. His basic argument is you Americans are so obsessed with the past, so obsessed with imitation of Europe and before Europe, you know, Rome and Greece, these forebears that you are stunted and will not develop a natural and healthy national character. He says, it is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans.

23:46Alexandra Schwartz:Right. So this this unhealthy and we still see it today. You know, I said squawking Americans are like, you know, the idea is like we are the ones who don't know more than one language, whereas Europeans are more sort of cosmopolitan. You know, we still have these ideas about to travel, especially for Americans, is improving because we come from such a sort of stunted and parochial culture. It's so much about the building of an identity.

24:16Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, Vincent, I think your point about this sense of Americans being this shapeless mass without culture, without history, trying to find themselves in Europe is so interesting because sometimes travel – you know, travel is this individual phenomenon that very quickly becomes a collective phenomenon. And you're describing the American – the classic American version of it perfectly. The classic English version of it is the grand tour, this pilgrimage that English gentlemen undertook to the continent, specifically to Italy and to see the great sites of Rome and also of the hated papists. So this took place, you know, this great Grand Tour took place basically between the 17th century and the mid-19th century when rail travel starts to make it a lot easier.

25:01Vinson Cunningham:But I think the thing worth noting in this context is that the Grand Tour is a collective experience because it defines something about who you are socially in England. You know, you're expected to have a certain kind of education to see the ways of others, often to kind of scoff at the ways of others. A huge experience of the Grand Tour is going and seeing ruins. Look, we are in the midst of the greatest civilization ever known to man, the British Empire. And look at what became of Rome. Let us draw lessons from this. I spent one summer in college cataloging an enormous number of sketches that young Englishmen made on the grand tour at the Yale Center for British Art.

25:37Vinson Cunningham:And all of them basically feature sheep and like a ruin. It's like look at what became of great Rome. Now it's a pastoral scene and we're here to learn from that. And also maybe we'll pick up some – if we want to be artists, we'll pick up some tips about how Michelangelo did things. Although one of my favorite grand tourist writers, the irascible Tobias Smollett, ended up just absolutely shitting on the Pieta when he saw it at the Vatican. He was like, why is this naked, emaciated man lying on a woman's body? So it's just lying. Oh, the horror of the papists. Yeah. So there was a lot of that. A lot of our culture is great.

26:12Vinson Cunningham:Your culture is not so great. But we need to observe it and understand it in order to glorify ourselves.

26:17Alexandra Schwartz:But of course this thing of personal experience amid a new backdrop. And this is part of the travel thing too that some of us, let's say Anglo-Americans or whatever, go to Italy or whatever to do things we wouldn't do at home. It's like what happens in Italy stays in Italy or whatever. And there may be two sides of that. There's the go travel to enrich oneself. The modern sort of ideal of this is Anthony Bourdain. We just marked six years since he died. That's right. And the other side of that is something like the White Lotus. Yes. Mike White's series where every year they're in a new locale and it begins with like someone has died.

27:04Alexandra Schwartz:And it goes back to see how this happened. And it usually has to do with some like louche, decadent scenario of people gone wild on vacation. Both of those, I think, are very predominant in our imaginations today, wouldn't you say?

27:19Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think that's really true. I mean, I think a lot of people would agree with this, which is that Parts Unknown, the Anthony Bourdain series, stands the test of time in a lot of ways because it's fundamentally a text about curiosity. Grilled goat with cabri, a traditional goat stew on the side.

27:36Alexandra Schwartz:Now we're talking. They roast it and they put some sauce on it. It's delicious. As you can see, people don't eat meat. Meat is quite expensive, almost$2. It is a lot. It's more than most people make in a day or even two days. What are the first things you buy if you're very, very, very poor? Very poor sauce.

27:57Vinson Cunningham:What Bourdain wants to know is how people do things elsewhere. and that is itself a kind of ethics of travel that is not necessarily widely shared but is huge to the experience for a lot of people. How do you do things somewhere else? Let me learn from it. Let me try to get an accurate view of it. I think there is a lot of beauty in that idea and nobility even in that idea and I do think Bourdain did it with a lot of integrity and that's why the show stands the test of time. I mean, I very much enjoy The White Lotus as a satire of people who go about travel in a totally different way which is how can I best get a sense that I'm engaging with another culture but completely not do that in any way?

28:37Vinson Cunningham:It's about entitled, super rich people who are used to the same backdrops throughout their lives, whether they're home or abroad, frankly. I'd love to hear that.

28:44Alexandra Schwartz:Listen, I want to do something special for my wife, but kind of romantic. It's our honeymoon. I'm thinking a candlelit dinner, totally off on our own, somewhere cool. It's like a beach or a cliff or just like an Instagram spot, you know? Yes, yes, how wonderful. Yeah.

29:04Naomi Fry:And of course, we do private dinners for couples all the time. But since you're such valued guests, and with the whole mix-up regarding your room,

29:14Vinson Cunningham:I would love to come up with something really unique. Okay, great. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking too. What about a candlelit dinner on our charter boat at sunset?

29:26Alexandra Schwartz:That sounds perfect. You can watch the sunset from a private cove. Oh, schools of dolphins leaping and circling the boat as you cruise the coastline.

29:35Vinson Cunningham:I mean, another show I'm curious if you guys have seen and what you thought of it, Conan O 'Brien Must Go. Have you guys watched that one? I haven't yet. Okay, so I will just tell you, I've seen now three out of the four episodes of it. I really don't like it. Okay, okay.

29:48Alexandra Schwartz:Is he being a zany Bourdain?

29:52Vinson Cunningham:So he's being kind of the anti-Bourdain. Where is he going? He's going in the episodes I've seen. He goes to Norway. He goes to Thailand. And he goes to Argentina. I think there's one more where he goes to Ireland. And the whole idea here is let me, you know, just like we were talking about Paige McClanahan's idea of the new tourist versus the stereotypical old tourist who makes it all about themselves and doesn't care what's happening around them and is chewing gum and being loud and obnoxious. basically Conan sets out to be the old tourist. That's kind of the joke of the show. And as he said, to learn absolutely nothing about the place where he's going.

30:25Vinson Cunningham:To me, like, I get the joke.

30:27Alexandra Schwartz:Is there one, like, scenario like this that, like, sort of emblematizes this approach?

30:32Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I would say, so the most recent episode I just watched is about Thailand. And he shows up and goes on a Thai show, like a singing competition show. And so the funny part of it is he doesn't speak Thai. He's super jet lagged and he has to learn how to sing and tie using subtitles to perform on this show.

30:50Alexandra Schwartz:And do you know that you come to this program, do you have to sing a song? I'm jet-lagged and I don't know the language. Let's give it a shot. Gentlemen. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

31:14Alexandra Schwartz:Wow. Wow.

31:18Vinson Cunningham:It's making this huge show of, oh, this place is like weird and zany and different, but I'm going to, you know, still show up and be the star. And like some of you may know me and some of you won't. It's about it's satirizing the idea of being a celebrity. But the point to me is I don't find it funny enough to justify this kind of Thailand. Yeah. And this kind of idea of let's sort of lightly mock other cultures while knowing nothing about them. Like, Vincent, you mentioned the idea of the colonizer before about travel.

31:43Alexandra Schwartz:Sure.

31:43Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think that that kind of prototype remains with all of us. Are you going to go and bring your own ways in and kind of stomp on the ways you find? That's right. Or are you going to go and be open to the new ways?

32:00Alexandra Schwartz:In a minute, how far will we go to truly get away? Critics at Large from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

32:20Vinson Cunningham:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order.

32:26Naomi Fry:Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at.

32:45Vinson Cunningham:Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

33:03Alexandra Schwartz:So we've spoken about Paige McClanahan's book, The New Tourist. But in another piece that she wrote for The New York Times, she says this. It's really interesting. For thousands of years, she says, humans have raced to be the first to scale a peak, cross a frontier, or document a new species or landscape. Now, in some cases, we're racing to be the last, end quote. And here she's basically getting at this idea that many of the places that we travel to are disappearing. When she says to be the last somewhere, I think she's specifically speaking about a certain kind of climate morning.

33:43Naomi Fry:Like a climate thing. Yes.

33:44Alexandra Schwartz:There will be places which, due to the warming of the planet, will be uninhabitable, unvisitable, soon, whatever horizon soon means to you. And therefore, you must get there before whatever the fjord overflows or melts or whatever, you know.

34:02Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I find this deeply distressing that that would be a main motivator for travel. I understand it, but it is so individualistic and such an individualistic solution, in deep square quotes, to a collective problem that I find it very distressing. I mean, I think McClanahan in this case is talking specifically about the Mer de Glace, which is the largest glacier in the French Alps, and it's rapidly melting. So what do you do? Do you keep away or do you try to rush there as soon as possible? I mean, in one sense, this is a political problem that we're thinking of as an individual problem. Maybe it shouldn't be up to us to make the choice.

34:40Vinson Cunningham:Maybe governments need to step in and say, we need to limit access to this place. And this has happened in a number of cases. I mean, another one I'm thinking of, Vincent, earlier, you mentioned a landscape that was absolutely trodden after Justin Bieber used it in one of his music videos. And that was Iceland.

34:57Alexandra Schwartz:He's rolling around in the moss. Yes.

34:59Vinson Cunningham:And like this is very fragile, delicate moss in Iceland that, as was later determined, will take like 100 years to regrow and needs absolutely no one to step on it. So I hope the moss would have been a believer.

35:12Alexandra Schwartz:If it wasn't before, it was after he fucking trampled it.

35:16Vinson Cunningham:Rolled on and out. Well, so basically, you know, 20 years ago, if you had gone to that spot, you would have had it to yourself. You would have been able to walk peacefully alone and think your thoughts. And now if you go there, you're going to find a parking lot, maybe some porta potties and a very narrowly roped off path that if you walk on it for five minutes will lead to a stunning landscape. But you absolutely cannot stray. And that's kind of how it's going to be. There are other places like this, like the beach in Thailand that was filmed in The Beach, the Leonardo DiCaprio movie that had to be closed off.

35:45Vinson Cunningham:I think it reopened in 2022. You know, if you're going to be the last to see something, I don't think that's necessarily such a badge of glory. There's other kind of like novelty stunt travel that's also worth thinking about. You know, there's a piece I love that we published in The New Yorker magazine by Ed Caesar, our colleague, in 2021 about this luxury travel company called Black Tomato. We are the inside track. The local knowledge.

36:13Naomi Fry:Unchartered territory. We are for Let's Go This Way. For writing a new story.

36:22Vinson Cunningham:What Black Tomato does is basically say, give us your phone, give us thousands of your dollars, and we're going to drop you into a locale whose name you do not and indeed will not know. We are going pure wilderness, and you're going to have to earn your way back to civilization. You're going to have to try to navigate back.

36:42Alexandra Schwartz:That's right.

36:43Vinson Cunningham:Find out how you can go on. You know, it's providing this kind of adventure experience, the total opposite of the super hyper luxury of something like the White Lotus.

36:53Alexandra Schwartz:It's like be on Survivor and pay us for it.

36:55Vinson Cunningham:Sure. Yeah. And I think it's about like hearkening back to this idea of the traveler, which frankly never existed as the sole lone wanderer in a totally foreign place. Travel has been going on for a really long time. And as long as it's been going on, people have been writing about and documenting their experience. So I think the idea of being the first is in many cases a bit of an illusion, as maybe is the idea of being the last.

37:18Naomi Fry:And it's also, you know, can end in disaster, as we saw recently with the submersible Titanic. Oh, yeah. Talk about that, Nomi. You know, disaster where it was a group of extremely rich men went on a submersible to arrive at the site of the Titanic's sinking. This was in June 2023. And they never returned.

37:47Alexandra Schwartz:One of the more terrifying stories. Yeah.

37:50Naomi Fry:I mean, honestly, it's like maybe the worst the worst thing to think about. But of course, because there seemed to be something so hubristic about this extremely expensive endeavor of going like all of these like multimillionaires in a tiny tin box. Yeah, paying$250 ,000 a person for what was supposed to be a few hours of a trip. That's right. Yeah. And going down deep kind of like against the wishes of Mother Nature, so to speak, you know, tempting fate. I think created a lot of kind of schadenfreude in a lot of us, I think. I mean, it was kind of became a bit of a meme, as rough as it is to say.

38:38Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think, you know, I don't think this experience reflected well on anyone, basically.

38:44Alexandra Schwartz:It didn't.

38:45Vinson Cunningham:We should say that one of the reasons that it led to such schadenfreude was the expense and the effort that went into the attempted rescue of these very super rich people when, of course, the ocean, as we know, has been swallowing up migrants by the thousands with very few rescue attempts made. So I think one question that surrounds us, and it surrounds us in every era of travel, is who gets to travel? You know, more people than ever now, certainly, but it is absolutely ironic to be contemplating travel by choice when we are at a moment of, I'm sorry if I sound like incredibly righteous or self-righteous or whatever saying this, but it's just true when we're at a moment of looking at unprecedented human migration that is made by necessity, that is often extremely excruciatingly dangerous.

39:34Vinson Cunningham:That to me, if I were to put my finger on what kind of disgusts me about people who would pay so much to do something like black tomato and be, you know, dropped into the wilds of who knows where in order to have the exciting experience of, you know, getting out, please just look at what the migrant journey is that people who are trying to move between Africa and Europe or people who are trying to move between Central America and the United States are undergoing. The contrast between doing this as a kind of leisure and the contrast between doing this as necessity is really striking. No, you're absolutely correct.

40:05And I think also, you know, even if we think about, you know, not about like chosen harrowing journeys, right?

40:15Naomi Fry:even if we think about luxury travel. Again, I'm not exactly sure whether I'm any different than McClanahan in saying, like, we should be aware of this. You know what I mean? Like, we should examine this at least in our heads. It doesn't mean that we are not going to travel. It doesn't mean that we're not going to take vacations. But we should be aware of power imbalances. We should be aware of, like, the cost on climate.

40:41Alexandra Schwartz:But I wonder if, you know, Some of the problems with travel, you know, not least the environmental question, what should we do? You know, obviously, like, this is, as everything in our world, it's one of those things that, like, calls out for big answers. But usually, like, it's left to us as individuals to figure out on our own, which is, like, the trouble. You know, we could travel less on our own. But how much is that going to change? But what should we do as people – all of us here, I think we would all classify ourselves as people who like to travel as a part of our lives as people. What should we do?

41:22It's such a hugely thorny question because even like – right, part of me wants to just punt it to the policy level.

41:29Vinson Cunningham:Ha-ha when that often does not work out well and say we need more regulations around travel to preserve the environment, to preserve some of these, you know, very delicate ecosystems, local sites, whatever. Of course, that's in conflict with economic needs. Many places rely on travel for their economies. One trend we're seeing with travel is not from the traveler's side. It's from actually government's side of charging fees. Venice is doing this. The Galapagos Islands have just raised the amount of money that you need to pay to access them as a way to both restrict the number of people who come to visit, but also to pay back into, you know, protecting the local ecosystem.

42:08Vinson Cunningham:You know, as individuals, it's also tricky because if you say like, well, we should all travel less, then you think, well, one of the reasons we're all traveling more is because travel has been democratized. So we can't just go back to an era when only the very few can access this and it's just for them and the rest of us, you know, stay home around the hearth or whatever. I do think realistically traveling less is not a bad idea and maybe – I think actually one thing that was examined during the pandemic is by necessity was what kinds of travel are necessary. Do you need to take the business trip for the two-hour meeting and return like traveling all over for very short periods of time because that's been the custom because it's been easy to do?

42:50Vinson Cunningham:The other answer, I think, is that it may need to become more expensive so that you have to think more about the – and again, I don't see that happening particularly. But, you know, quality over quantity. That's kind of the answer, I think. It's also good to stay home sometimes.

43:05Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah.

43:05Naomi Fry:I like being home. Yeah.

43:08Alexandra Schwartz:Amen.

43:10Naomi Fry:That's my environmental take.

43:13Alexandra Schwartz:It's really interesting. You know, I've been trying to think this whole time about what it actually means to me. travel and at least for me i don't know about you guys but i always i always cry on vacation like every time because for while on vacation or on vacation okay while on vacation and it is usually because i'm thinking about i'm seeing something that i may not see again and this maybe this this connects with this idea of like the death of the planet for me i think travel is kind of also about mortality generally it's like you only get so many summers you can only take so many trips this is why like i think the the reigning metaphor for me of tourism even though we've talked about literature is really the photograph the sort of acquisitive i saw that you know like and now i can add it to my yeah i can add it this very like almost financial metaphor of i can therefore add it to my bank of experiences um and really the only other thing that i can think of like that is literature this thing that's supposed to like sort of double your life you know make your life more than what it can really plausibly actually be given all the limits of our lives here's a way to make it seem denser thicker than it was no you're right i think there's

44:27Naomi Fry:something sad about it i mean i can identify with what you're saying i don't know necessarily that i cry every time i travel but i there is an idea of like will i ever see this again well i'll tell you

44:40Vinson Cunningham:guys something, which is one thing that's really important for me as a traveler is the experience of being foreign. I really need to be foreign every so often and to feel foreign. That is something that's very important in my life, to feel estranged and to feel new and the challenge of those things. And I don't think you have to go into the middle of nowhere to feel that way. You know, I think another thing, especially at this point in my life, is I'm making peace with not seeing everything, period, and knowing that I'm not going to see everything. Like you talk about not returning to a place.

45:18Vinson Cunningham:I'm starting to realize, well, there are places I may never go. And this has actually made other people's accounts of them in the deeper sense more important, like maybe seeing it through someone else's eyes.

45:29Alexandra Schwartz:You'll settle for the vicarious in some cases. Yeah.

45:32Vinson Cunningham:And I think that could be a good way to do it because I have become conscious of what it means, the cost to the planet, you know, let alone myself, of travel.

45:40Alexandra Schwartz:What you said about a new self or a new version of yourself is so true. And that's part of it, too. It's like, first of all, you get the fantasy of total freedom. What would happen if I just didn't get on that plane tomorrow and I just lived the sort of branching off fantasy?

45:53Naomi Fry:Sliding doors.

45:54Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. But then I think that's also for me connected to I was thinking before we got on about like what is the truly the first travel narrative I can remember. And, you know, and I think this is deeply like goes to my view of it. It's the book of Genesis. It's God telling Abraham, like, go. You're happy in the land of Ur, which is like supposedly like in, you know, current day Iraq. No, go. No, there's a land where, like, I'm going to bless you and your descendants will be. You're only going to know yourself until you, like, once you land in Canaan, right? This promised place. I'm not even going to tell you how to get there.

46:36Alexandra Schwartz:Just go. Keep following me, you know?

46:38Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, some of us are still fucked up by this to this day. Oh, my God. No, I mean I know it well.

46:44Alexandra Schwartz:But, I mean, this is deeply resonant in my life. No, totally. The real version of you might not be where you started, you know? Like, go where I send thee, you know? And the real you might show up.

47:09Alexandra Schwartz:This has been Critics at Large. Our senior producer is Rhiannon Corby. And Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condé Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Jake Loomis with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics and you can email us at themail at newyorker.com with the subject line, Critics. See you next Thursday.

47:50Thank you.