Have I written about this topic too many times? Oh, but I must be entitled to have another go at it.

Because there's a new New Yorker article : "The Case Against Travel." 

The new article — subtitled — "It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best" — is by the philosopher Agnes Callard.

A few of my old efforts: 

• "What if Americans stopped believing the travel propaganda?" 

• "'Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us...'" 

• "Of course, I'm reading 'If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?'" 

• "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..." 

• "'I learned about post-tourism, which is just research jargon for traveling hipsters...'" 

• "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

I'll take a few excerpts from Callard, and certainly some of this is new (and all of it is well expressed):

"If we accept that biography, as Julian Barnes once wrote, is, at best, 'a collection of holes tied together with string,' how does one go about writing a biography of a person allergic to personhood?"

"That Pessoa’s name is Portuguese for 'person' must have given him perverse satisfaction, he who wrote the word 'me' in quotation marks. 'I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,' he wrote. 'I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me.' Or he was 'the naked stage where various actors act out various plays.' Or, he wrote in a poem, 'merely the place / Where things are thought or felt.' His heteronyms were addicted to their obscurity, vain about their privacy and pained when forced to 'publish' their work. It’s the self conceived as a lump of sugar; it must be dissolved to be tasted."

From "‘Pessoa’ Is the Definitive and Sublime Life of a Genius and His Many Alternate Selves" a review of "Pessoa: A Biography" in the NYT. 

"His heteronyms" refers to the personas Fernando Pessoa adopted in his writings.

Here's the masterpiece: "The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition." I put it in my Kindle. Excerpt:

All pleasure is a vice because seeking pleasure is what everyone does in life, and the worst vice of all is to do what everyone else does. 

I do not dream of possessing you. What would be the point? It would be tantamount to translating my dream for the benefit of a plebeian. To possess a body is to be banal in the extreme. To dream of possessing a body is perhaps, were such a thing possible, even worse; it would mean dreaming oneself banal — the supreme horror.

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....