The Snug: A Blog

I'm always surprised by how many educated, middle-class people I know who have traveled less than, say, your average Victorian pastor, who made it a point of making at least one pilgrimage to the Holy Land in his lifetime, to return with magic-lantern slides of the Dome of the Rock and Gethsemane with a few fleabitten camels standing about in the background. One thinks also of the traditional Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries, embarked upon by college graduates and society debutantes, partly for snob value, no doubt, but basically because it was understood that you could never acquire real, deep culture if there was never any confluence in your life between your imagination and your actual experience, in the places where Western culture was forged: the streets of Rome, the corridors of Hampton Court, the galleries of the Louvre, the Parthenon, etc. I wonder if the reluctance of such people–and I'm mostly referring to Americans of relative affluence and culture who may have been to Hawaii and the Caribbean, but never manage to get to Europe–is really because of lack of time and money, as they will all say if asked, or something deeper: personal insecurities when confronted with a foreign setting, for instance; the unease of unbelonging; the dread of disaster occurring beyond the known shore; sheer lack of interest...? Of course, I've had a considerable advantage, being born, in the words of Springsteen, in the USA, but growing up, in the words of the Beatles (there! I can drop pop references as well as the next guy), a "nowhere man," as much at home in Europe, where I lived for 20+ years, as in Texas, where I've been for 16. Still, it is easy to travel these days, and, unpleasant though flying may be, it's fast and relatively cheap. So if you can get to Paris or London for the same price as to L.A., and if you've never been, why not go?

Mark Twain was a great roamer of the world at a time when such an endeavor involved far more hardship and expense than it does today, and he was all for hitting the road:

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it solely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one corner of the earth all one’s lifetime."