My Goddamn Blog

There seemed a mention in each of our readings, though sometimes briefly, about the distance felt by each author not from the homes and lives they left but rather from the subjects whom they studied. Rorty hopes for their forgiveness in the first sentence of his preface. Anderson parodied the purpose of a book itself: “You may burn it but it will not much warm your house, if you have a house.” And in Sullivan’s Travels, just a moment after we quit it, the director’s butler warns: “You see, sir, rich people and theorists—who are usually rich people—think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches—as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague…”

There is no doubt a difference in perspective and especially while writing to illuminate those who, as Anderson says, might not have a house much less a book, there seems a sense of disconnect. What purpose does it serve them? What purpose does one’s travels serve the people whom they visit?

Of course when we travel we rarely do it for the sake of our visitors. And likewise, I think it would be a mistake to visit the tropics merely for its warmth. The ends of one’s travels isn’t the exotic, rather it is only the means to better know what’s local to us—we leave our homes for what we may return with, be it a week or a decade later. Traveling without the notion of a home would be like eating without the notion of being full, and an appetite for the exotic could become quite hard to fill. Without a sense of origin, studying the poor and writing of the homeless would be a strange fixation, rather than a tool to understand our wealth and the “positive plague” found in its absence.

So I direct this toward my many friends have who have adopted a fetish for foreign lands and a boredom toward their homes. The gift of travel isn’t to experience oneself amongst alien people in exotic landscapes, but to witness a people at home, elsewhere. We travel to see the locals of another city or the inhabitants of a strange forest. If there were no locals—if we all were travelers—there would be nothing to gain from leaving.