Travel writers like me spend a lot of time contemplating why people venture abroad. Not just the obvious enticements — relaxation, winter sun, cheap pilsner — but the emotional, soul-stirring stuff: the sustenance of the new. The awe. It has, I think, become one of the main incentives of our travelling lives. As spirituality wanes experience is the new faith, and we are refugees from the mundane.
But behind this quest for the big, beautiful and baffling is a disconcerting sense that wonder in the age of the bucket-list is under attack. From technology, from information overload, from the anti-spiritual cynicism of the post-hippy world. In an era where a child has only to hold a five-inch screen in front of their face to gorge themselves on the apparent miracle of a one-inch Dora the Explorer hatching from a two-tone chocolate shell, awe has started to feel increasingly elusive.
It doesn’t take a bona fide philosopher to understand that this diminution of the human experience is an inevitable price of social progress. Awe, after all, used to be much easier to come by. Imagine you’re a Stone-age hunter witnessing a solar eclipse (not like last month’s anticlimactic, cloud-snuffed eclipse. A proper one.). Suddenly, the sun is extinguished. You don’t know it’s a temporary phenomenon, an orbital idiosyncrasy. So you tremble, piss your mammoth-skin pants, invent Gods! That’s a great big uppercut of awe.
Travel, for many of us, has become a means of trying to resuscitate that sense of humbling incomprehension. Awesome places, whether natural or man-made — the sort that are endlessly catalogued in a thousand ‘things to do before you die’ books — have become lodestars for the restless mind, places to light out for. But it’s harder to feel awe when your eclipse is preceded by a 24-hour news preamble sucking every last grain of mystery out of the process.
The result is a uniquely modern malaise in which awe has become fugitive: desperately sought yet ever harder to wrest from the claustrophobic clamour of our overcrowded little planet. Our culture is all grown-up. And like the adult who realises that the illusionist is a con-man, not a conjurer, we’re becoming dulled by over-discovery and over-supply.
Real-life awe barely cuts it anymore; we have Photoshop and CGI outdoing the actual. In 1896, when the Lumière brothers premiered their 50-second movie in a Parisian theatre — of a flickering locomotive chugging towards the camera — people fled the auditorium. Now we watch The Hobbit, where 3D armies of orcs, trolls and warmongering dwarves appear utterly, compellingly alive, and shuffle out of the multiplex feeling lobotomized.
The city-dweller’s connection with nature — the most prolific wellspring of earthly wonder — is eroded, near-severed. Romanticising landscape is barely tolerated. Wordsworth would never get away with that lonely cloud shit now. People would just call him a self-regarding hipster wanker. Familiarity breeds contempt. Cynicism withers all. When was the last time you witnessed something special without seeing a photo of it first?
Perhaps the greatest problem, though, lies in the paradox that genuine wonder becomes more slippery the more you pursue it. You can have a bucket-list as long as your arm, but any inveterate awe-chaser will tell you that the carefully planned event, loaded with its adherent expectations, is too open to disappointment.
Say your great travelling aspiration is to witness the Northern Lights (and, let’s be honest, if you subscribe to bucket-lists, there’s an 80% chance it is). You’ve made it to the Arctic Circle, journeyed out to some gloaming Nordic fastness. And there! The ethereal vision of electric green ripples oscillating across space — curling, coalescing, painting great glyphs in the sky. Your imagination unfurls: one moment you see a charging horse, the next a crashing wave. What could it mean, this incandescent tumult, these billion motes of cosmic dust carried on the solar wind? You reach for your camera, then pause. No. You just want to breath this in (there are good photos available on Google images). Hair on end, eyes agog, soul vaulting, you shiver. But wait! What’s this? The couple from your group-tour have marched into your field of view. Backs turned to the light, they hold the phone aloft. Pout, snap; pout, snap. “This is so awesome,” the man breathes, returning to your side. And — POP! — your reverie is gone.
by Henry Wismayer, Medium | Read more:
Image: © Trond Kristiansen
But behind this quest for the big, beautiful and baffling is a disconcerting sense that wonder in the age of the bucket-list is under attack. From technology, from information overload, from the anti-spiritual cynicism of the post-hippy world. In an era where a child has only to hold a five-inch screen in front of their face to gorge themselves on the apparent miracle of a one-inch Dora the Explorer hatching from a two-tone chocolate shell, awe has started to feel increasingly elusive.It doesn’t take a bona fide philosopher to understand that this diminution of the human experience is an inevitable price of social progress. Awe, after all, used to be much easier to come by. Imagine you’re a Stone-age hunter witnessing a solar eclipse (not like last month’s anticlimactic, cloud-snuffed eclipse. A proper one.). Suddenly, the sun is extinguished. You don’t know it’s a temporary phenomenon, an orbital idiosyncrasy. So you tremble, piss your mammoth-skin pants, invent Gods! That’s a great big uppercut of awe.
Travel, for many of us, has become a means of trying to resuscitate that sense of humbling incomprehension. Awesome places, whether natural or man-made — the sort that are endlessly catalogued in a thousand ‘things to do before you die’ books — have become lodestars for the restless mind, places to light out for. But it’s harder to feel awe when your eclipse is preceded by a 24-hour news preamble sucking every last grain of mystery out of the process.
The result is a uniquely modern malaise in which awe has become fugitive: desperately sought yet ever harder to wrest from the claustrophobic clamour of our overcrowded little planet. Our culture is all grown-up. And like the adult who realises that the illusionist is a con-man, not a conjurer, we’re becoming dulled by over-discovery and over-supply.
Real-life awe barely cuts it anymore; we have Photoshop and CGI outdoing the actual. In 1896, when the Lumière brothers premiered their 50-second movie in a Parisian theatre — of a flickering locomotive chugging towards the camera — people fled the auditorium. Now we watch The Hobbit, where 3D armies of orcs, trolls and warmongering dwarves appear utterly, compellingly alive, and shuffle out of the multiplex feeling lobotomized.
The city-dweller’s connection with nature — the most prolific wellspring of earthly wonder — is eroded, near-severed. Romanticising landscape is barely tolerated. Wordsworth would never get away with that lonely cloud shit now. People would just call him a self-regarding hipster wanker. Familiarity breeds contempt. Cynicism withers all. When was the last time you witnessed something special without seeing a photo of it first?
Perhaps the greatest problem, though, lies in the paradox that genuine wonder becomes more slippery the more you pursue it. You can have a bucket-list as long as your arm, but any inveterate awe-chaser will tell you that the carefully planned event, loaded with its adherent expectations, is too open to disappointment.
Say your great travelling aspiration is to witness the Northern Lights (and, let’s be honest, if you subscribe to bucket-lists, there’s an 80% chance it is). You’ve made it to the Arctic Circle, journeyed out to some gloaming Nordic fastness. And there! The ethereal vision of electric green ripples oscillating across space — curling, coalescing, painting great glyphs in the sky. Your imagination unfurls: one moment you see a charging horse, the next a crashing wave. What could it mean, this incandescent tumult, these billion motes of cosmic dust carried on the solar wind? You reach for your camera, then pause. No. You just want to breath this in (there are good photos available on Google images). Hair on end, eyes agog, soul vaulting, you shiver. But wait! What’s this? The couple from your group-tour have marched into your field of view. Backs turned to the light, they hold the phone aloft. Pout, snap; pout, snap. “This is so awesome,” the man breathes, returning to your side. And — POP! — your reverie is gone.
by Henry Wismayer, Medium | Read more:
Image: © Trond Kristiansen
