The Case Against Travel.

That's the title of an article in the current issue of The New Yorker.  It's available online, and it's brilliant.

I'm in that category of people who don't like traveling.  I like it in the abstract, but in the reality not so much.  When travel is approaching, I frankly dread it.

This is a bit ironic for a person who has traveled as much as I have.  I've been to three foreign countries, a minor number by real traveler standards, and a large number of the States.  Having said that, since graduating from college, all of my travel to foreign countries has been work related in some sense.  And prior to that, every trip out of the country, in those cases all to Canada, were to visit relatives, save for one.

The ironic thing is that I generally don't mind traveling when I am traveling.  The article itself taps into why. Travel for work is not vacation travel, so there's nothing, if you will, artificial about it.  Vacation travel can be artificial, although unlike the author of this article not all of it is.  I could imagine living a life in retirement in which I traveled with my spouse and dog in our trailer to hunt and fish, perhaps going all the way up to Alaska, but that's also a bit different.  It's more like being a nomad, which our species once was universally.

A friend of mine loves traveling, and given the traveling that he does, I have a sneaking suspicion that the day will arrive at which he wants to retire and that retirement will have been delayed, some of his retirement money having been spent on travel to far distant places.  He's invited me on trips more than once, and I've always declined.  "Don't you want to see the Holy Land?".  No, I don't.  "Don't you want to see Rome?" Well, if I was in Italy, I'd go to Rome, but I'm not going to make it a purpose destination.

Travel for work. . . or for study, and study can be one's own personal studies, is different.  That's noted in here as well.  

It's refreshing to read somebody who gets it.

I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

Fernando Pessoa