The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... So damn your food and damn your wines, Your twisted loaves and twisting vines,... Your table d'hôte, your à la carte, . . . . From now on you can keep the lot. Take every single thing you've got, Your land, your wealth, your men, your dames, Your dream of independent power, And dear old Konrad Adenauer, And stick them up your Eiffel Tower.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After Stéphane Mallarmé, after Paul Verlaine, after Gustave Moreau, after Puvis de Chavannes, after our own verse, after all our... subtle colour and nervous rhythm, after the faint mixed tints of Conder, what more is possible? After us the Savage God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New York ... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a ...flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...we were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because ...everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »