On Tour

In touring the world I’ve only ever sliced person-sized cross-sections through a massive simultaneity of experience. Like cuts in flesh, they heal up behind me, save for a few scars here and there where I might have managed to make contact, or where I ended up in the background of someone else’s holiday snapshot. On some scale, this is true for everyone. ‘What is life,’ wrote George Satayana in his essay ‘The Philosophy of Travel’ (1964), ‘but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world?’

Friends often ask which were my favourite places to visit, but the truth is I can’t hold them all in my mind. What makes a place nice to visit, anyway? The pleasure it provides for its visitors? Who am I that Thailand must delight me? I’m horrified when a country is described as having a ‘warm people’, as though each citizen must please the sweaty strangers who choke the streets. Thailand — or any other place — can only exist. And by existing can only remind the traveller that other modalities are possible, that no way of living is a natural consequence of being alive on this planet. That should be enough.

by Claire Evans, Aeon |  Read more:

Photo courtesy: Claire Evans