Monday, September 15, 2008

an insect on a dead thing


As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and- find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way—hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.


From footnote number 6 in David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, an essay written for Gourmet Magazine in August 2004. Via (...).

David Foster Wallace passed away on Friday, by all signs by his own hand.

We lost a good one.

3 comments:

Elefanterosado said...

Oh, that sucks about David. And he was a personal friend of a friend of mine. Writers sure are a turbulent lot. :-(

mrtn said...

I was actually really upset about this. Wallace was one of the writers who really said something important about my life.

Unknown said...

wow. i wanted to research some on David Foster Wallace when I heard the news on NPR the other day. i think you have found what i would have been looking for, not the right way to put that maybe... but to carry this kind of feeling with you, not run to ground, not reconciled to something can have its cost, i think. to be numb to it is probably not much better. and so then you arrive at a bit of a point....

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