Do you ever feel that there is something aseptic, almost clinical about the way we travel today?
We experience the world without allowing it to penetrate us, losing that mutual, bidirectional exchange. We have learned to move through it, but not to let it move through us.
It is enough to observe how we move, efficiently and almost frictionlessly, 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. 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 reassuring, but to me it leaves behind a faint sense of lifelessness.
Rodolphe Christin puts it rather bluntly in his Manual of Anti-Tourism, suggesting that tourism has ultimately turned places into available surfaces, spaces arranged to be crossed without resistance. As that resistance disappears, so too does the possibility that something might oppose us, not necessarily in a negative way. And without that tension, perception seems to lose both depth and a certain innocence.
It is clear that we move more than ever, but how much of that movement actually transforms 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 a way of feeling the true scale of the world, without haste, with all its frictions and rough edges.
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 already adjusted, the mind lagging behind, as if the spirit had not had time to follow the physical transition.
Hence that persistent sense of familiarity that is so hard to shake. Because, in the end, it hardly matters where we are. We have already been there, in some way. We have seen it, read about it, consumed it before ever walking through it. Travel ceases to be an opening and becomes a verification. We are not going to discover. We are going to confirm.
In this context, the figure of the traveler begins to feel suspicious, almost anachronistic. And it is difficult not to think of the Hungarian Tibetologist and linguist Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, who crossed thousands of miles under harsh conditions without feeling the need to turn his experience into a narrative, writing only when compelled to, and doing so in a dry, almost reluctant manner, as if narration itself were foreign to the journey:
“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 Heaven (Edward Fox).
I also think of the great French-Belgian traveler, orientalist, Buddhist, and writer Alexandra David-Néel, crossing similarly inhospitable Asian territories. She did so from a willingness to be traversed by the unknown, not from any desire to renounce narrative. In her writing 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 only lived, it is recorded, and more than that, overexposed, whether for ourselves or for others. It is shaped from the outset by a certain economy of visibility, in which it is no longer enough to be somewhere; one must produce evidence of having been there, and of having lived it as expected. We 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 reaffirm our place within it.
This becomes especially evident in the almost mechanical repetition of gestures. The same routes, the same frames, the same expectations. Not because there is a lack of diversity, it would take lifetimes upon lifetimes to see everything, but because our gaze arrives pre-formatted, shaped by a disturbing and recognizable homogeneity. We move through it and consume it in the same way.
Do we experience in order to understand, or accumulate in order to say we have experienced?
I want to feel discomfort, to be bored, to understand nothing. To constantly question what I am doing and why I am there. I want my journey to be made of moments that do not yield, that do not produce, that resist being turned 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 one another, bidirectionally, until we lose our footing, intoxicated by life at its deepest core.
And yet, if we look closely, we are building a world of travel that adapts to us with remarkable efficiency. And is it not somewhat sad that, in that adaptation, it loses its capacity to unsettle us? Because only what unsettles us can lead us into inner territories we did not know existed.
In the end, what matters is not how much we have traveled, but whether something within us has shifted, whether we have managed to step, even slightly, outside that way of being in the world, shedding a layer of cultural artifice we have come to mistake for our own skin.
Perhaps travel, in its most demanding sense, has less to do with distance than with accepting a loss of control, with exposing oneself to not understanding, to not mastering, to not being able to immediately translate everything into a coherent narrative. When it happens, you recognize it. And, truthfully, it feels right.
Perhaps, in a world that reduces experience to calculation and spectacle, that instability is the only thing still worth calling a true inner journey.
