1. What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country . . . we are seized by a vague fear, and the instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being . . . This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in travelling, and I look upon it as an occasion for spiritual testing. . . . Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way that distraction, as in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves. —Albert Camus, 1963

2. Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines . . . you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That is not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating. —Michael Crichton, 1988

3. Such are the dispositions of men in general in these voyages that they are seldom content with the hardships and dangers which will naturally occur, but they must add others which hardly ever had existence but in their imaginations, by magnifying the most trifling accidents and circumstances to the greatest hardships, and insurmountable dangers . . . as if the whole merit of the voyage consisted in the dangers and hardships they underwent, or that real ones did not happen often enough to give the mind sufficient anxiety; thus posterity are taught to look upon these voyages as hazardous to the highest degree. —Captain James Cook, 1768-1781

4. Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories. . . . I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist. —Claude Levi-Strauss, 1975

5. Traveling is medieval. Today we have means of communication, not to speak of tomorrow and the day after, means of communication that bring the world into our homes. To travel from one place to another is atavistic. You laugh, gentlemen, but it’s true, travel is atavistic. The day will come when there will no more traffic at all and only newlyweds will travel. —Max Frisch

6. To alight in a country without knowing a word of the language is a worthwhile lesson. One is reduced, whatever identity or distinction one has achieved elsewhere, to the level of a near-idiot, trying to conjure up a bed in a sign language. Instead of eavesdropping drowsily, one is forced to look at the eyes, the gestures, the intent behind the words. One is forced back to a watchful silence. —Alastair Reid

7. The dog, sitting on the pavement, looked me in the eye when I got off from the bus in Hakaniemi, and suddenly, I felt we both acknowledged an encounter. I didn’t try to guess what kind of a story s/he invented in her/his head of me, and the only idea I had about her/him was that Mika Waltari used to have that kind of dog, too. Corgies. “Fugitive and ephemeral” though the gaze I exchanged with this particular corgi may have been, I was struck for the rest of the day with a strange thought: a dog had seen me. —George Simmel, 1950

8. [I hope that] someday we will all be Tourists. I do not mean to say that every one of us will in some fashion need to visit the places on our personal maps labeled terra incognita, camera straps slung over our necks. Rather, it is my hope that we will recognize that coming home after a day at work is, in its essence, the same thing as walking a wilderness road for the first time. When I go home this evening, the light will have changed. . . . Tourism, in the good sense that I want it to mean, does not begin with the first outbound plane ticket, or the second. Each day creates a new terra incognita out of the whole universe, each morning a new and unexplored venue for the Tourist. To be a Tourist in the way I mean is to learn a new way of seeing freshness, a way to value the smallest and most perfunctory actions of our days. —W. Scott Olsen, “A Tourist’s Petition”

9. Both for the few adventuring travelers who still exist and for the larger number of travelers-turned-tourists, voyaging becomes a pseudo-event. . . . Planned tours, attractions, fairs, expositions “especially for tourists,” and all their prefabricated adventures can be persuasively advertised in advance. They can be made convenient, comfortable, risk-free, trouble-free, as spontaneous travel never was and never is. We go more and more where we expect to go. We get money-back guarantees that we will see what we expect to see. Anyway, we go more and more, not to see at all, but only to take pictures. Like the rest of our experience, travel becomes a tautology. The more strenuously and self-consciously we work at enlarging our experience, the more pervasive the tautology becomes. Whether we seek models of greatness, or experience elsewhere on the earth, we look into a mirror instead of out a window, and we see only ourselves. —Daniel Boorstin, A Guide to the Pseudo-Image in America