Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. ... The explorer seeks the... undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. ... If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates. ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The age of independent travel is drawing to an end," said E.M. Forster back in 1920, when it had been increasingly clear for deca...des that the mass production inevitable in the late industrial age had generated its own travel-spawn, tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood. If travel is mysterious, even miraculous, and often lonely and frightening, tourism is commonsensical, utilitarian, safe, and social, "that gregarious passion," the traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor calls it, "which destroys the object of its love." Not self-directed but externally enticed, as a tourist you go not where your own curiosity beckons but where the industry decrees you shall go. Tourism soothes, shielding you from the shocks of novelty and menace, confirming your prior view of the world rather than shaking it up. It obliges you not just to behold conventional things but to behold them in the approved conventional way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption ... is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has b...ecome banal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drif...t across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those whose goal it is to sell domestic dwellings hope to persuade their patsies that a house and a home are identical, and thus a...dvertise "a lovely quarter-of-a-million-dollar home." But since a housewrecker differs significantly from a homewrecker, the inference is clear that house and home mean different things, although the new gentility and sentimentality, issuing in the new euphemism, labor constantly to efface the difference. The Philadelphia Inquirer has spoken recently of boarding homes, and it will probably not be long before we hear of whorehomes, homes of prostitution, and bawdy homes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a pe...rpetual love affair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »