June 24, 2023

The case against travel

 Sam Smith - Was glad to see the New Yorker article offering the case against travel. Especially liked these quotes:

The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage: "I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of traveling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel."

(If such views outrage you, you are not alone. If there is one thing about which my wife of 56 years and I don't agree most strongly it is the virtue of travel.)

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