boorstin21

ii₄

FrcrmTrrueler to Tcrurist:

The next development has been the lutury mjbtel. With its stateroom-sized sleeping rooms, “fabiitori?> bar, and deck-sized swimming pool, it now resembles nothing so much as the luxury ocean liner. “Getting there is half the fun.” Tourists and business travelers “relax in luxurious surround-ings.” The motel passenger, too, is now always in mid-ocean, 7 comfortably out of touch with the landscape.    —'

On the new interstate speedways we see the thorough dilu-tion of travel experience. The motels, which Vladimir Nabo-kov has brilliantly caricatured in Lolita, are the appropriate symbol of homogenized American experience. Although (perhaps because) no place is less any place than a motel, people nowadays vacation in motels for a week or morę as they used to relax in luxury liners. They prefer to be no place in particular—in limbo, en route. Some new tourist restau-rants on super highways (Fred Harvey has a large chain of these of uniform design, appropriately called “oases”) are actually built on top of the highway, on a bridge, to which speeding motorists have equally easy access, regardless of the direction in which they are going. There people can eat without having to look out on an individualized, localized landscape. The disposable paper mat on which they are served shows no local scenes, but a map of numbered super highways with the location of other “oases.” They feel most at home above the highway itself, soothed by the auto stream to which they belong.

Now it is the very “improvements” in interstate super highways (at expense to the Federal government alone of a half billion dollars a year) that enable us as we travel along to see nothing but the road. Motor touring has been nearly reduced to the emptiness of air travel. On land, too, we now calculate distances in hours, rather than in miles. We never know quite where we are. At home, as well as abroad, travel itself has become a pseudo-event. It is hard to imagine how further improvements could subtract anything morę from the travel experience.

”5

The Lost Art of Trtnrel

VI

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or morę in-telligible notion than that of going on a joumey. Travel— movement through space—provided the universal metaphor for change. When men died tłiey went on a joumey to that land from which no traveler retums. Or, in our cliche, when a man dies he “passes away.” Philosophers observed that we took refuge from the mystery of time in the concreteness of space. Bergson, for example, once argued that measurements of time had to be expressed in metaphors of space: time was “long” or “short”; another epoch was “remote” or “near.”

One of the subtle confusions—perhaps one of the secret terrors—of modem life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we ouce did. Moying only through time, measuring our distances in homogcneous ticks of TheTĆlock, we are at a loss to explain to ourselves what we are doing, where, or even whether, we are going.

As there comes to be less and less difference between the time it takes to reach one place rather than another, time itself dissolves as a measure of space. The new supersonsc transports, already in the design stage, will take passengers across our continent in less than two hours, from Europę to America in two hours and a half. We are moving toward “In-stant Trayel.” It is then, I suppose, thoroughly appropriate in this age of tautological experience that we should even-tually find ourselves measuring time against itself.

We cali ours the “Space Age,” but to us space has less meaning than ever before. Perhaps we should cali ours the ' “Spaceless Age.” Having lost the art of travel on this earth, having homogenized earthly space, we take refuge in the homogeneity (or in the hope for variety) of outcr space. To travel through outer space can hardly give us less landscape experience than we find on our new American super highways. We are already encapsulated, already overcome by the tourist problems of fueling, eating, sleeping, and sight-seeing.