Do you ever feel that there is something aseptic and deeply clinical about the way we travel today?
We experience the world without letting the world penetrate us, losing that mutual, bidirectional contact. We have learned to move through it, not to let it move through us.
One only needs to look at how we move, with impeccable efficiency and almost no friction, across a planet that seems to have been discreetly reorganized to fit our expectations, where nothing should inconvenience us too much or interrupt the flow of movement. A clean, intelligible, optimized journey. End of story.
We end up knowing what we will find before seeing it, where we will be before arriving; even what kind of emotion it is legitimate to inhabit. It may feel deeply reassuring, but to me it leaves a somewhat lifeless feeling.
Rodolphe Christin puts it rather bluntly in his Manual of Anti-Tourism, suggesting that tourism has ultimately turned places into available surfaces, mere spaces arranged to be traversed without resistance. As that difficulty disappears, so does the very possibility that something might oppose us (not necessarily in a negative way). Without that opposition, I feel that perception loses both depth and a certain innocence.
It is clear that we move more than ever, but how much of that is actually transforming us?
I like to imagine that distance once imposed a kind of slowness that forced us to negotiate with both the environment and time; that arriving somewhere meant passing through something, not only in geographical terms. Perhaps it was also an attempt to feel the true scale of the world, without haste, with all its frictions and its roughness.
Now the leap is immediate, almost indecent in its speed. You board a plane as someone and land exactly the same: a different time zone, the body on schedule, the mind lagging behind, as if the spirit hadn’t had time to follow the physical transition.
Hence that feeling of anticipated familiarity that is so hard to shake off. Because, in the end, it hardly matters where we are: in some way, we have already been there. We have seen it. We have read it. We have consumed it even before walking through it. Travel ceases to be an opening and becomes a verification. We are not going to discover anything. No. We are going to confirm.
In this context, the figure of the traveler begins to feel suspicious, almost anachronistic. And it is hard not to think of this passage about the Hungarian Tibetologist and linguist Alexander Csoma de Kõrös, who crossed thousands of miles under harsh conditions without feeling the slightest need to turn that experience into a narrative, writing only when he was compelled to, and doing so in a dry, almost uncomfortable way, giving the impression that narrating was a task foreign to the journey itself:
“What is truly astonishing about Alexander Csoma de Kõrös and his journey is that if he had not been compelled by a British official in India in 1825, six years after he set out, to write this account of his activities and movements since leaving Hungary we would have no record whatever by Csoma’s own hand of his thousands of miles of gruelling travel, and of his bitterly hard sojourn in the Himalayas. Unlike today’s traveller who sets out with a diary, a camera and a book contract, he had no intention of attaining celebrity for a contribution to the literature of travel. The account he wrote consists of eight printed pages of terse narrative, in legalistic numbered paragraphs, as if he were forcing them out with the greatest difficulty and reluctance.” — The Hungarian Who Walked to the Heaven (Edward Fox).
I also think of the great French-Belgian traveler, orientalist, Buddhist, and writer (among many other things), Alexandra David-Néel, crossing similarly inhospitable Asian territories. She did so from a willingness to be traversed by the unknown, not from a renunciation of narrative. In her writings, there is a certain joy in uncertainty, an absence of control over what escapes the grasp of the mind. A disposition toward the unknown lived in openness, far from any sense of threat:
“Ever since I was five years old, I wished to move out of the narrow limits in which, like all children of my age, I was then kept. I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown. But strangely enough, this ‘Unknown’ fancied by my baby mind always turned out to be a solitary spot where I could sit alone, with no one near.” — My Journey to Lhasa (Alexandra David-Néel).
Alexandra, in the center, and her adoptive son and travel companion Yongden, on the left, in Lhasa (1924)
Contemporary travel is not limited to being lived. It is recorded. And, more than that, it is overexposed, for our own pleasure or perhaps for that of others on social media. It is shaped from the outset by a certain economy of visibility in which it is not enough to be somewhere: one must produce proof of having been there, and of having lived it as one is supposed to. Travel not only to see, but to be seen seeing.
I sense that travel is ceasing to be an encounter with the other and becoming a staging of the self: we do not discover the world, we confirm our position within it.
This becomes especially evident in the almost mechanical repetition of certain gestures, imitating the same routes, the same frames, the same expectations. Not for lack of diversity at all (it would take eons of lifetimes to see everything), but because our gaze already comes pre-formatted, under an unsettling and recognizable homogeneity. We move through it and consume it in exactly the same way.
To experience in order to understand? Or to accumulate in order to say we have experienced?
I want to feel discomfort, to be bored, to understand nothing. To constantly ask myself what I am doing and why I am there. I want my journey to be made of moments that do not pay off, that do not produce, that do not fit into an easy narrative.
I do not want guarantees that everything will make sense. I long for the journey and myself to truly pass through each other, bidirectionally, until we lose our sense, drunk on life to the very core.
And yet, if we take a look at reality, we are creating a world of travel that adapts to us with admirable efficiency. Is it not sad that, in that adaptation, it loses its ability to unsettle us? Because only what unsettles us can lead us to explore hidden inner rooms we did not even know we had.
In the end, what matters is not how much we have traveled, but whether something within us has moved, whether we have managed to step outside, even slightly, of that way of being in the world, freeing ourselves from a layer of cultural makeup we have come to mistake for our own skin.
One could argue that travel, in its most demanding sense, has less to do with going far than with accepting that loss of control, with exposing oneself to not understanding, to not mastering, to not being able to immediately translate everything into a perfect narrative. When it happens, it is recognized. And, truthfully, it feels good.
Perhaps, in a world that reduces experience to calculation and spectacle, that instability is the only thing still worth calling an ungovernable inner journey.
