AGAINST ‘THE CASE AGAINST TRAVEL’
On check-list mentality and past wanderings
I am writing from a cafe in Tirana off Rruga e Durresit about a hundred yards from Skanderberg Square. I arrived here on Friday night from London. I’m staying at the Hotel Artist for $30 a night. Most of the plugs don’t work, so I can’t put my apple juice in the refrigerator. There’s a stool by the window with an ashtray. The shower isn’t bad. The room could use a desk, and the wifi from the router in the hall a floor down is spotty. The speakers at the cafe are playing dance covers of familiar pop hits. The song playing when I sat down was the Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’, mixing emo-ish male vocals with an uptempo, vaguely euro beat—an ungodly, indeed zombielike combination.
I woke up at 3 p.m. Last night, experiencing jet lag-induced insomnia, I read a book about the American publishing industry and watched Lumet’s The Pawnbroker and Friedkin’s The French Connection. You might say my head is still in New York City. Most nights my dreams take place there and on waking I have to shake the place out of my head. That is, to some extent, the point. Since leaving New York at the end of April, I have passed through ten cities in the past two months, with three stops in New York along the way. Over the winter, after some real estate problems and emotional disappointments, I decided to put my possessions in storage in Brooklyn and ‘walk the earth’, as I put it to the last guy I was subletting from. I was invited to three weddings this year, and so far I have attended two of them—thus, in part, the itinerary. I am carrying a blue duffel bag with busted zippers and a Paris Review tote bag full of books. I have brought work with me and have been working hard, sometimes pulling all-nighters, in which case jet lag can be an asset. I wrote obituaries for Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy in the Financial Times. I have five essays in progress for five publications. I plan to finish three of those before I go to sleep. (Editors, I promise.)
Another thing I read last night was ‘The Case against Travel’ by Agnes Callard, in the New Yorker. Callard’s brief is mostly against tourism, rather than the itinerant wandering and visiting friends and family that I’ve been doing the past three weeks. I have mostly been to places I’ve been, even where I’ve lived, before, with the exceptions of Tel Aviv (wedding); Moab, Utah (a friend working on a movie set invited me); and Albania, where I’m settling for the next three months. There’s an internal contradiction in Callard’s argument. Towards the end she admits that people like to travel because it’s ‘fun’—that is, the primary motivation of travel is hedonism. Yet hedonism seems to be so far outside her purview (her purview being virtue, achievement, self-improvement) that she ignores it, except for the potential intoxication of seeing sights, which she considers phony or at least inauthentic, and making friends among foreigners, which she considers impossible, at least for a tourist. (Living and working somewhere new is different in her estimation.) Her examples, from her own life and other writers, partake of the idea of the most photographed barn in the world out of Don DeLillo’s White Noise—a kind of checklist mentality about going away from home.