travel: the heroic: a quest for communion and self-knowledge
The planet's size hasn't changed, of course, but our outsize egos have shrunk it dramatically. We might feel we know our own neighborhood, our own city, our own country, yet we still know so little about other individuals, what distinguishes them from us, how they make their habitat into home.
This lack of awareness is even more pronounced when it comes to different cultures. The media bombards us with images from far-away places, making distant people seem less foreign, more relatable to us, less threatening. It's a mirage, obviously. The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn't about pain or excessive strain -- travel doesn't need to be an extreme sport -- but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely. We might never understand travel as our ancestors did: our world is too open, relativistic, secular, demystified. But we will need to reclaim some notion of the heroic: a quest for communion and, ultimately, self-knowledge.
-- Ilan Stavans, professor of literature at Amherst College and Joshua Ellison, editor of the literary journal Habitus.