{"id":412,"date":"2013-04-01T12:57:05","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T18:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/?p=412"},"modified":"2013-07-06T07:56:30","modified_gmt":"2013-07-06T13:56:30","slug":"a-tourist-atravel-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/archives\/412","title":{"rendered":"TOURISM OR TRAVEL?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\"MEMORIES<\/a> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 TOURISM OR TRAVEL?<\/span><\/em> \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s settled: I\u2019m off to France in June for three weeks of Gallic culture! I\u2019ve booked the cutest hotel <\/a>in Paris for four nights; I\u2019ll be meeting a couple of Parisian girlfriends, but I\u2019m also planning to wander for hours by myself\u2014to take in a couple of museums and the wonderful\u00a0Les\u00a0<\/em>Puces\u00a0<\/em>flea market, to buy my new favourite perfume at Galeries Lafayette<\/i><\/a>, and to saunter down cobblestone alleys and the walkways along the Seine River. Maybe I\u2019ll remember some of my French phrases for eavesdropping as I sip vin blanc<\/i> at a sidewalk caf\u00e9<\/i> or when ordering bistro<\/i> feasts. Then I\u2019m off to the South for a visit with my third French girlfriend and her family\u2014including a tour of restaurants, a night in an ancient mas<\/i> (Proven\u00e7al farmhouse\/mansion), and all the home-grown strawberries I can eat. Superbe!<\/i><\/p>\n

My friend Dallas shared with me a rivetting article, \u201cReclaiming Travel<\/a>,\u201d which appeared last summer in a column in The New York Times<\/i>. The basic thesis is that today\u2019s tourism<\/i><\/b> (modelled by my upcoming vacation with its focus on rest and restaurants, entertainment, and personal enrichment) is but a faint shadow of real travel<\/i><\/b> (more like a pilgrimage or quest in its cross-cultural, transformational search for meaning). Tourism is largely what we do<\/em> nowadays; travel is something more rare that changes who we are<\/em>. The human journey first started, the writers of the piece claim, at our expulsion from the Garden of Eden, when we were condemned to wander\u2014our wandering becoming a wondering about exile and about our true home, with hearts restless for something lost.<\/p>\n

Of course, journey is a frequent theme in classic literature; think of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/i> (telling of the Greek hero\u2019s mythic return home after battle) and Dante\u2019s Divine Comedy<\/i> (a spiritual travel tale tracing the path from the \u201cdark wood\u201d through hell and purgatory to heaven). The meme continues through to stories written today, from Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/i>, Innocents Abroad<\/i>, and Around the World in Eighty Days <\/i>to Lord of the Rings<\/i>, A Year in Provence<\/i>, and Eat, Pray, Love<\/i>. I could go on, but you get my point.<\/p>\n

The motif of travel is omnipresent in the late-Victorian writings of G.K. Chesterton. In Everlasting Man<\/i> he wrote:<\/p>\n

\n

There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Then, encapsulating the nature of journey, in What\u2019s Wrong with the World<\/i>\u00a0Chesterton wrote a couple of lines that I used as the first epigram in my own novel:<\/p>\n

\n

Man has always lost his way. He has been a tramp ever since Eden; but he always knew, or thought he knew, what he was looking for.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(If you\u2019re interested in the biblical ground for mankind\u2019s wandering and wondering about the road, homecoming, and rest, you might like to read three short literary\/biblical studies I posted in April, June, and July of 2012, here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

My meandering thoughts today have set me on a course of inner contemplation regarding why I love to visit exotic places and what adventure really means to me. My forebears travelled, in the true sense of the word, to make a home in a foreign land\u2014largely for religious freedom. So my history connects travel with spiritual life. Yet here I am, a few generations later, traversing the globe for personal, emotional, and gastronomical satisfaction. Much as I\u2019d love to pretend I might just find an epiphany on French soil, I concede that my trip is more tourism than true travel. I don\u2019t expect great character growth (though I might be surprised); I just hope I properly pronounce merci!<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"PARIS<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 TOURISM OR TRAVEL? \u00a0 It\u2019s settled: I\u2019m off to France in June for three weeks of Gallic culture! I\u2019ve booked the cutest hotel in Paris for four nights; I\u2019ll be meeting a couple of Parisian girlfriends, but I\u2019m also planning to wander for hours by myself\u2014to take in a couple […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":416,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rolledscroll.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}