boorstin3

From Trtrueler to Tourist:

wear out the once-common meanłng of “an unusual, stirring, experience, often of romantic naturę,” and return “adven-ture” to its original meaning of a mere “happening” (from the Latin, adventura, and advenire). But while an “adven-ture” was originally “that which happens without design; chance, hap, luck,” now in comraon usage it is primarily a contrived experience that somebody is trying to sell us. Its changed meaning is both a symptom of the new pervasive-ness of pseudo-events and a symbol of how we defeat our-selves by our exaggerated expectations of the amount of unexpectedness—“adventure”—as of everything else in the world.

p

There is no better illustration of our newly exaggerated expectations than our changed attitude toward travel. One of the most ancient motives for travel. when men had any choice about it, was to see the unfamiliar. Man’s incurable desire to go someplace else is a testimony of his incurable ^:: optimism andinsatiablejcuriosity. We always expect~tEmgs to be different over there. “Traveling,” Descartes wrote in the early seventeenth century, “is almost like conversing with men of other centuries.” Men who move because they are starved or frightened or oppressed expect to be safer, better fed, and morę free in the new place. Men who live in a \a>^ secure, rich, and decent society travel to escape boredom, to /elude the familiar, and to discover the exotic.

' They have often succeeded. Great stirrings of the mind have frequently followed great ages of travel. Throughout history by going to far places and seeing strange sights men have prodded their imagination. They have found amaze-ment and delight and have reflected that life back home need not always remain what it has been. They have learned that there is morę than one way to skin a cat, that there are morę things in heaven and earth than was dreamt of in their philosophy, that the possibilities of life are not exhausted on Main Street.

In the fifteenth century the discovery of the Americas, the voyages around Africa and to the Indies opened eyes, en-

The Lott Art ofTravel

larged thought, and helped create the Renaissance. The travels of the seventeenth century around Europę, to America, and to the Orient helped awaken men to ways of life different from their own and led to the! Enlightenrnent. The discovery of new worlds has always renewed men’s minds.

Travel has been the universal catalyst. It has madę men think faster, imagine larger, want morę passionately. The returning traveler brings home disturbing idęąs, Pascal (three centuries before television) said that man’s ills came from the fact that he had not yet. leamed to sit ąuietly in a room.

In recent decades morę Americans than ever before have traveled outside our country. In 1854 about thirty-odd thousand Americans went abroad; a century later in 1954 almost a million American citizens left the United States for foreign parts other than Canada and Mexico. After allowing for the increase in population, there is about five times as much foreign travel by Americans nowadays as there was a hundred years ago. As a nation we are probably the most traveled people of our time, or of any time. What is remark-able, on reflection, is not that our foreign travel has in-creased so much. But rather that all this travel has madę so little difTerence in our thinking and feeling.

Our travels have not, it seems, madę us noticeably morę cosmopolitan or morę understanding of other peoples. The    ^; Jtui

explanation is not that Americans are any morę obtuse or -U i uneducable than they used to be. Rather, the travel experi-ence itself has been transformed. Many Americans now “travel,” yet few are travelers in the old sense of the word. A The multiplication, improvement, and cheapening of travel facilities have carried many morę people to distant places.

But the experience of going there, the experience of being there, and what is brought back from there are all very diflerent. The experience has become diluted, contrived, prefabricate^l.    '^Wl CL'^ ¹

le modem American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both morę strangeness and morę familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has