"It is lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home?”
— Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”
Waiting in a lengthy line at Paris Orly International Airport, my eyes were drawn to a travel pillow, a blanket and a sweater, all of which produced an inimitable combination of royal blue and Velveeta orange.
Flanking me in line were three varieties of Gator tourist. First, the Southern couple, returning from a honeymoon in Italy and France. The husband, a Hungry Man of a human being, Alabama-born and Gainesville-rotted, boasted, “Baby can cook better chicken parm’ than the Italians.” They’d loved Venice and Paris. Second, there was the backpacker couple, sporting shit-faced grins as they declaimed the wonders of Prague. Lastly, the undergraduates, finding and discovering themselves with the soft yet firm support of their Gator neck pillows.
In a particularly harsh way, this spontaneous community of Gators invaded on my image of myself: The lone girl, half-pretending to read an André Gide novel, guarding her anachronistic and impractical leather suitcase. Beyond the animalistic pleasures of excess drinking and tourist trap eating, all seven of us had come to Europe to say something about ourselves. In so doing, we fell prey to the myth of travel.
If the city is the stronghold of provinciality, the road is the stronghold of the home. The traveler leaves port, laden with her image not only of Paris but of herself in Paris; not only of Europe but of herself, dynamized, crystallized, actualized in Europe. Our expectation of some earth-shaking epiphany leaves us desperate to discover something different. The availability heuristic invades, and we report back that Parisians are slender, well-coiffed and delicately dressed in gossamer fabrics of subtle shades. The obstacle of observation trips us up, and we report back that Parisians are rude, short-tempered and superior.
We travelers categorize the foreigners we meet, reducing them to one more paradigmatic example of a general truth. We recite: Germans are cold, Slavs are open, Americans are puppy dogs. This leap to culture can blind us to the individuality of those we meet, leaving us with friendships that are merely trophies to display on a shelf.
Perhaps this impulse to find difference leads to the second symptom of the traveler: his chauvinism. Pushkin penned his odes to Russia only once in exile, and I never feel more American than when I speak to a French person about America. For us from Florida — a land where history is as thin as the candy on an M&M — perhaps travel’s real value is its creation of a home. Holographic, composite, constructed for an audience of anyone, this homeland is no more true or false than any nostalgia.
Is travel a flimsy compensation for spiritual failure? Is there something silly and sad about our geographical fallacies, our collective illusion that we find something real, gratifying and authentic in a simple change of space, in the multiplication of backdrop?
I want to tell every French person who tells me “Miami, j’adore!” that Miami isn’t just the slice of hyperreality by the bay, but the Haitian immigrants holding up “Parking $5” signs next to the hulking, wasteful, ample baseball stadium parking garages; it’s the Hialeah Cubans who will never leave Hialeah, let alone Miami; it’s the comatose addicts steps away from the University of Miami Health System. It’s the sheer geographic and social confinement of the city — sprawling, inhuman, indifferent. Why would anyone visit that Miami?
A traveler can never know the real of anywhere, insofar as real life is the life of repetition. Real life is disenchanted. Of course, there is some value to going unstuck — as a lone traveler, especially, it’s remarkable how quickly real life fades and dulls, like oils under thinner. But is what replaces it any truer, or is the psyche of the traveler a palimpsest of half-truths and half-lies, sketched in broad strokes and never revised?
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
