Here is a piece from the late great DFW who shows how a great writer can write about anything and still make you think, and feel.
as for the title Let’s just say that I’ve turned down a lot of vacations that I can honestly say I don’t like being a tourist. I went to baguio a month ago with Chuck,Vince and Tonio , and when we were deciding where to go Chuck wanted to go to an uninhabited island whilst I was really pushing towards a real tourist destination. This seems wierd. The fact is what I was trying to do was akin to what I used to do when I was a child and had a tooth that was about to fall off. I just kept moving it feeling the pain but nonetheless still doing it, till the pain becomes enjoyable and suddenly your tooth falls off. I loved going to Baguio, but I can say that any time and any where I am with friends and I can say with a straight face that I do not like tourist’s destinations, they me feeling something that I have failed to bring to life using my meager vocabulary and my ill command of the english language. The words quoted below do justice to my inner conflict with being a tourist. I don’t know I fancy myself as a traveller.
As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
Consider the Lobster: 2000s Archive : gourmet.com.
