Travel is Beautiful

And travel is also political.

My favorite place on this green earth.

Earlier this month, I published an essay in the Guardian in defense travel, partly in response to the viral Agnes Callard New Yorker essay The Case Against Travel. I pitched the essay mostly on a whim. I read Callard’s provocative piece, thought to myself “well this is sad,” and sent an email to my editor.

Sitting down to write was a different thing. “Go travel, it’s fun, unless you hate it, then stay home, that’s fine too” is not exactly a compelling case (or enough to fill column inches). And Callard has a point when she argues that, among highly-educated liberals, there’s a sense of travel as an obligation, a way to be seen as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan person, and a kind of aspirational shortcut to personal betterment that can be more performative than pleasurable. Your tour of the Acropolis is probably not going to make you a smarter person (you probably won’t remember 95% of the fun facts you heard by the time you get home). Your hike down the Appalachian Trail will probably not turn you into a woodswoman; seeing the Mona Lisa will probably not turn you into a great appreciator of the arts. Callard makes this case well. But mostly, she just seems to find travel unpleasant and inconvenient.

It’s not lost on me that Agnes Callard is, let’s say, a unique person. This Rachel Aviv profile of her, her career in moral philosophy, and her decision to divorce her husband to pursue a graduate student but have them all live together is a must-read, not just because the story is wild (although it is), but because it gives you a good sense of all the ways in which Agnes Callard is perhaps not all that much like me or you or the average person who might be, say, wandering down the streets of Paris or taking a camping trip in the Rockies. She is a person very much in her own head. And despite all the romantic shenanigans, she does not strike one as a person who is deeply adept at social interactions.

And so it perhaps makes sense that she finds travel intolerable, finding greater joy in her own imagination and ruminations. Fair enough! Part of being an adult is realizing that not everyone likes what you like, and that’s what makes the world varied and interesting. There is also the fact that a lot of people spend a lot of their time doing things they don’t particularly enjoy because they think they should should do them. No doubt Callard’s essay spoke to some of these weary travelers who would prefer the comforts of their own bed and their careful routine.

But I suspect the essay touched a nerve because for a lot of folks, travel feels important, but it’s tough to articulate exactly why, and saying that travel is merely pleasurable doesn’t seem like justification enough — especially when a moral philosopher has just thrown a quote at you claiming that “Travel is for those who cannot feel.”

To be clear, I think finding pleasure in novelty — new places, new foods, new people, new kinds of beauty — is justification enough for traveling, and that some of our best feelings are spurred from experiences not imagination alone. And I hope you’ll read the whole essay defending travel. In writing it, and in spending days and days thinking about why I travel, and what people derive from travel, and whether travel is morally justifiable given our burning planet, I found that the reasons organize themselves into a few buckets.

1. Travel lets us experience other ways of living, and reimagine our own.