Why travel all over the world looking for things to see when you can see so much on repeated walks through the same place? It's like marriage...
September 16, 2019
The same small place after a 14-hour interval...
Why travel all over the world looking for things to see when you can see so much on repeated walks through the same place? It's like marriage...
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Why travel all over the world looking for things to see when you can see so much on repeated walks through the same place? It's like marriage...
...or one of those crazy Kavanaugh parties.
But doesn't traveling give you a reference point, and allows for compare & contrast? If all you've seen is one place, you have nothing to compare it with.
BTW: I hope this isn't a cafe post. Don't these photography/cafe posts come at the end of the day? Forever puzzled by the order-of-operations on the Althouse Blog.
It is, indeed, like marriage. Now tell my wife, please.
@Gregg
It's just the next thing I felt like putting up.
I would prefer the discussion here to be on topic. The topic is the depth of experience that is within reach if you stay within a small space like Picnic Point or a marriage as contrasted to roaming about traveling the world and having a lot of different relationships with other people.
There are no small places, only fat people.
A safe space. Marriage makes a companion into a safe space. The original family is called the Trinity. They decided to make men in their image and give them the Earth and all that it contains to guard it and maintain it.
During the past 10 years or so mrs. stevew and I have been exploring a lot of local, Boston area, stuff. I've lived here my entire life and she moved here at age 4. We've now done the Freedom Trail, a walking tour of Boston's North End (with a guide explaining many of the various historical points), and very many self guided hikes, just to name a few. It is true that we've also done international travel, we are in Italy now, but I don't think these things a mutually exclusive. We don't have to travel to see variety, but we do enjoy both types of exploring.
What do they know of England, who only England know?
No lines can be drawn here, that mean much to me. I've lived in the same city all my life, I've been married to the same woman since 1977, I spent my working life at the same school, I have many of the same friends, interests, and hobbies that I did 50 years ago.
OTOH, there are places in this country and in Europe that I want to see--and they are related to the same friends, interests, and hobbies, so it's not either/or.
Narr
Non-binarist
"It's like marriage..."
Unless your marriage is with Mark Sanford and your hike is the Appalachian Trail.
"It's like marriage..."
How true.
I believe that the American culture is so dominant, and overwhelming, that Americans have "virtual horse blinders" and people can really benefit from foreign travel.
Why travel all over the world looking for things to see when you can see so much on repeated walks through the same place?
Because one can do both. It's not an either/or. And the former can make one appreciate the latter even more. (The assumption that people who like foreign travel are necessarily more "shallow" in their appreciation of home than those who do not, is as self-flattering and false as the notion that those who don't travel abroad must be ignorant and unsophisticated, relative to those who do.)
What I see on my usual walking roots at home is endlessly absorbing. But so are the things I visit and re-visit on foreign trails, and they are very different from what I see at home. I'm grateful that I have the means and the health to do both.
Yes, like marriage. There's a quote I have written down somewhere to the effect that saying one needs to experience love by sharing it with many different women is like saying that you need more than one violin to play an endless variety of music.
Not ever leaving your local area can lead to huge misunderstandings. You can live in NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and a few other cities your entire life, and never see all the books and crannies. And come to the unfounded conclusion that everyone can live without a car, using mass transit, walking places. If you live, as I do, intended of nowhere, you have to travel outside the boundaries of your rural conclave to purchase necessities or for any medical care other than a routine check up. And there are some middles of nowhere where you have to travel for that. I just drove from NY to WV to TX to CO. Along the way you see interstate highway exits on to dirt roads, and looking down those roads to the horizon you see no signs of human habitation. But somewhere down that road people live, and work, and sometimes need to get to town. They can't call for an Uber or Lyft, and there's no bus stop outside their door. Without privately owned automobiles, reliable ones with IC engines, and reasonably prices gasoline, those ranchers and farmers producing our food become peasants.
I'm not sure whether it's the deliberate policy of the Democratic Party to create peasants, or if all those representatives from urban and suburban areas have never travelled across this country by automobile or bus and viewed the reality of life in extreme ruralville. I really suspect they want to create peasants.
Travelling by air as the elite and political class do, you can see vast areas that appear empty, but it's at ground level where you really understand it.
Very true, especially with regard to photography.
The contemporary landscape photographer John Wimberley--before he decided to earn his living exclusively by selling prints--photographed for many years a in place called Coyote Hill, near where he worked. He remarked once that the variety of good pictures he was able to make in that one small place was a commentary on how little we perceive of our surroundings on any given occasion.
Then, one day, he made this one, and he knew it was time to move on to other places.
http://johnwimberleyphotography.com/gallery.php?g=9
I am still working in the same few locations in the Pinelands and occasionally make a new discovery in a familiar place.
"Because one can do both. It's not an either/or. And the former can make one appreciate the latter even more. (The assumption that people who like foreign travel are necessarily more "shallow" in their appreciation of home than those who do not, is as self-flattering and false as the notion that those who don't travel abroad must be ignorant and unsophisticated, relative to those who do.) What I see on my usual walking roots at home is endlessly absorbing. But so are the things I visit and re-visit on foreign trails, and they are very different from what I see at home. I'm grateful that I have the means and the health to do both."
This is the argument for polyamory.
Discuss!
"You see, that's why I think that people have affairs.... Well, have an affair, and up to a certain point, you can really feel that you're on firm ground, you know. There's a sexual conquest to be made. There are different questions. Does she enjoy the ears being nibbled? How intensely can you talk about Schopenhauer at some elegant French restaurant? Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth. Well, have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years. That's completely unpredictable. Then you've cut off all your ties to the land, and you're sailing into the unknown — into uncharted seas."
"Usual walking roots" is lovely.
Narr
Hold me a place
This is the argument for polyamory.
Sure, why not? Both involve a feeling described as love (there's the -amory bit), and more than one object for that feeling (there's your poly-)!
That leaves us...where?
Now, sophomoric word games aside, how are polyamorous sexual relations *really* like enjoying going to some place that isn't home? Not merely in the logical linguistic sense, but in regards to the moral weight that you're trying to attach to the act of traveling or not-traveling. Do the categories "human sexual relations" and "traveling" share the same sorts of moral features that make it meaningful or useful or analogize them in this way? (Or emotional/social/ethically consequential features, if "moral" rubs you the wrong way here.)
I want you to think *deeply* about this, Althouse. No trite law professor sophistry, please. (And btw, remember that most (all?) of your analogies and arguments against foreign travel apply equally to traveling to places that are not your home, in your own country.)
You've got a month, 'cause I'm on my way out for a long walk abroad.
Vaya con Dios, AD,SB !
Travel and sex with someone you love, a great combo if you can get it.
Narr
Later
"You see, that's why I think that people have affairs....
Andre was wrong about that, too. It's not firm ground--it's exciting. The same is true for travel, and both are superficial.
To get to a deeper appreciation requires you devote the time, concentration, and focus, to more fully explore--to pursue more of less instead of less of more.
“And we shall not cease our wandering. And after wandering the entire world, we will arrive at the point of our origins. And see it for the first time.”
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