Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 427

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel," by Shahnaz Habib.

This has happened to me again and again. In a new place, I am never adventurous; I am cautious. It takes me a few days simply to get used to stepping out of wherever I am staying. At first, I stick to the neighborhood, like an animal getting used to a new environment. I want to be curious and intrepid; instead, I am confused and lonely. (Jet lag does not help.) And always I am conscious of what a waste of time this is. If only I could just get up and go do things, how much time I could save. I am basically the opposite of Anthony Bourdain.

A couple of million Americans visit Paris every year. Interestingly, the average American would not have thought of France as a tourism destination until well into the twentieth century. Prior to that, European travel from the United States was largely limited to the wealthy, soldiers, businesspeople, and diplomats. It was the twentieth century that made Paris an American destination, beginning with U.S. troops who carried back Paris’s reputation as a city of pleasures. In the flurry of postwar travels, many American writers and artists made themselves at home in Paris. A Moveable Feast and Tender Is the Night and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas captured the life of these expatriate American bohemians in the Left Bank. It was the beginning of an enduring American Francophilia.

The anxiety women feel in nature has additional layers for Black women, for other women of color, for queer women, for trans women, for women with disabilities—and none of it is because of snakes or slippery waterways. It is because the wilderness, too, has become a space where male privilege plays out. From hunting to natural science to wilderness tourism, men have claimed the landscape of wilderness and the metaphors of its ruggedness. The framing of wilderness as the antithesis of domesticity, of rule of law, of safety, has served men so well.

When we travel, we are not moving from place to place. We are moving from one moment in time to another moment in time. We are tricking ourselves into paying attention to the thing that is hardest to pay attention to. On the carousel and on the tourist trail, it is time that reveals itself. The present does not exist. Only the past and the future do. But on the border between those two, a border that is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword’s edge, there is a moment. To call it the present would be to overstate it. But it is there: a microworld of galloping horses, overheard conversations, and bits of song. There is no now but now.