In her postwar essay Pyrrhus and Cynéas (1944), Simone de Beauvoir stages a conversation between the Greek Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus born in 318 BCE, and Cinéas, his adviser. They discuss Pyrrhus’ plan to conquer the world. Her first existential philosophical essay, Pyrrhus and Cinéas was written during Nazi occupation. While it interrogates ethical and political questions of violence and war, the text opens with one simple question: What is the rationality of Pyrrhus’ action in leaving his home to conquer the world? Cinéas claims it’s irrational: conquests are futile. What after subjugating Greece, asks Cinéas, what then? Pyrrhus responds: then Africa, then Asia, then Asia minor, then Arabia, and then India, and then I will rest. Cinéas asks: “Why not rest now? What’s the use of leaving if it is only to return home?” Cinéas is confirming the anxiety of mortality instilled in all of humanity: if we must die, my projects have no meaning. If there is no ‘end’ that can be attained, if I cannot conquer the entire world, if each minute I must move from task to task, with no end in sight — What’s the use of starting? One might say the same about a backpacking trip.
I saw the same rhetoric denouncing the inability of travel to achieve an ‘end’ in philosopher Agnes Callard’s essay turned book, ‘The Case Against Travel’. The polemic dissent against travel stirred displeasure and eye-rolls among an ever-growing community of proud nomads. After all, it opened with the sentence: “What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” I tend to agree with Callard on the annoying and self-congratulatory trappings of travelling. Proclaiming travel as a personality trait is a cheat code to appearing more interesting, a postured and easy indicator of ‘cool’ to others. If we quantify being interesting as the sum of different experiences in a man’s life, then sure, an avid traveller might win, having ‘seen’ more than someone who stayed in the comfort of their abode hooked to their laptop. Travel certainly makes for a hell of a story: the proliferation of the backpacking memoir — think Shantaram, Walk, Into the Wild, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road — is a microgenre of its own that has inspired droves of tourists to crawl over the globe to purposefully seek obscure and authentic experiences. They are spurred on by Anthony Bourdain, the late chef turned writer turned TV host of ‘Parts Unknown’. His legacy lives on, memorialised in the hall of tragic and troubled greats whose words have become a bible:
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you– it should change you. It leaves marks on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body…”
Many, many men of the Western world discover Anthony Bourdain’s Hemingway-esque affirmations (they both died by their own hands after leading hypermobile travelling lives) and accordingly foster their passion for travel on Instagram reels, curated pages like hidden.ny, and Facebook. Bourdain champions a style of solo travelling in developing corners of the world characterised by recklessness and danger, off the beaten path, which only an able-bodied male could do on the fritz and yet escape unscathed. Like Callard, I roll my eyes, although I do so more out of an envy for this male privilege of going solo than anything (in my attempts to explore my home country, India, I must fend off my parents’ justified fear-mongering). I suppose I also reserve a special resentment for a certain archetype of traveller that resembles a ‘conqueror’ searching India for treasures. They conjure up the image of the coloniser, and this is bitter considering the widening wealth gap in developing countries. Is the first-world backpacker the metamorphosis of the coloniser, normalised and welcomed to sustain the tourism-dependent economies of the Global South? Are they travelling to conquer bragging rights, treating the world as a belt on which each culture is reduced to a notch?
Callard problematises travel perfectly: “Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people”. To an extent, I agree that travel can make us ‘interesting’. As Albert Camus believed, the ‘absurd’ man must revolt against his mortality merely through the act of living and collecting experiences: “All those deaths and all those rebirths gathered together as in a sheaf make up for Don Juan the flowering of his life.” Where Don Juan was a fictional womaniser, the traveller can derive pleasure and fall in love ten times over with each foray into a different country. However, travel is not a bandaid to patch up a vacancy in a person’s ‘lacking’ self. We can scurry to foreign lands but we cannot forget ourselves. Callard quotes Fernando Pessoa, whom she calls the “greatest hater of travel”:
“Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! . . . Travel is for those who cannot feel. . . . Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.”
Ouch. Pessoa’s character in The Book of Disquiet quoted above is right; however, to feel that there is so much to learn about the self at home that restless mobility may not address the needs and voids in our souls. As Seneca writes in his letters, tearing from place to place, distracting ourselves with illusions of tourism prevents us from deepening our connections with ourselves and loved ones: “To be everywhere is to be nowhere”.
Bourdain acknowledges himself that part of the reason for his frenzied pace of travelling and working might have been a fear of being alone with the dark thoughts that caused him to take his own life. Travel isn’t the cure-all it might be touted as in backpacker/pilgrimage manifestos steeped in spirituality. As Tagore wrote: “I have spent a fortune travelling to distant shores and looked at lofty mountains and boundless oceans, and yet I haven’t found time to take a few steps from my house to look at a single dew drop on a single blade of grass.” Abusing travel as a substitute for a personality is something you and I might be guilty of. I certainly have rolled my eyes– out of a mixture of jealousy and well-earned scepticism of exactly how ‘authentic’ their experience was– whenever someone felt compelled to enlighten me as to how a certain tramp around a developing country changed their lives. Couldn’t you just as well have done shrooms in your home to discover that same empathy?
We tell ourselves that travel makes our lives well-spent, and we tell others our lives are successes by showing off our travels. Collecting souvenirs, photos, and contrived stories, we are accumulating proof of a life, a narrative of excitement. In an age of social media where travelling feels motivated towards producing a perfect ‘photo dump’, this thought is compelling. On my recent trip to Mysore Zoo (against my will), the throng of visitors shoving towards the cages and railings just to capture greedy videos with dismal camerawork on smartphones made me even more depressed than the animals in captivity. The pluming red-blue flights of the macaws, interrupted by the tightness of their enclosures, made me yearn to see them in South American treetops instead. I thought, how beautiful it would be if we could all see this bird flying in complete freedom in the Amazon rainforest. Is touristing just treating a country like a zoo? Callard calls it travel’s ‘dehumanising effect’, the locals of another country as artefacts. This raises the ethical question of tourists indulging in the hospitality of their obliging hosts, as Bourdain encourages, without necessarily rewarding their hospitality in return, even as tourists often earn in much stronger currencies like the US dollar or Euro.
While Callard indulges in an anxious search for an end goal to travel, I posit that the human condition is to move. Called asks, like Cinéas: “They may speak of their travel as though it were transformative, a “once in a lifetime” experience, but will you be able to notice a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, their moral compass? Will there be any difference at all?” The answer, undoubtedly, is yes. There is always a difference, but the value we may impute to it is irrelevant as a justification for the action. As Beauvoir writes, “As human I am perpetually transcending myself toward a yet to be defined future in which I seek to establish myself in my concrete particularity”. To be human is to act, to move, to transcend, to surpass. The cynic says there are “neither absolute ends nor guaranteed justifications for our projects”. To the cynic, travelling without a noble end of learning is perverse, but from an existentialist perspective, it is unavoidable to travel. In spite of the futility of any action on this Earth, Beauvoir writes the human perversion of needing to act, to be a movement forward, is an essential condition of humanity: I rest in order to leave again. Let’s admit, as Heidegger does, that “Man is a being of faraway places”. Callard decries the meaningless “locomotion” of tourism, but to condemn a man to stay in a state of solid inertia is to abolish life’s infinite promises. We must travel, we must look toward the other.
Callard makes interesting observations as to what we could do to stop indulging in tourist traps and doing things for the sake of a photo or bragging rights. But I think we must travel: I have a thing for lost causes, for sinking money into experiences that may be underwhelming (the first English breakfast I ate in London that nearly bankrupted me, thanks to inflation), purely spurred to do things out of the absurd situations that travelling demands. An existentialist ethic of travel demands, in a way, what Callard does. She ends the article by compelling us to do away with some pretence that we are affected profoundly by seeing the Vatican or the Mona Lisa. No experience, at home or abroad, holds any more objective value than another, only the value it takes on in the bumbling, deferential, ingratiating tourist’s eyes. We shouldn’t insist on a meaning to attribute to travel. How should we travel? We shouldn’t travel “as preparation for death”, as Callard suggests we do– man’s authentic project is not ‘being for death’, we are beings for nothing.
In an incredibly globalised and industrialised society, travelling might be one of our only recourses to transcend ourselves — albeit escapist. When the facticity of our nine-to-fives is strangling, and our professional lives infiltrate our personal lives through constant notifications from email inboxes, changing our SIM cards upon arrival on distant shores might constitute our rare freedom. However, is travelling numbing us from realising our dissatisfaction with capitalist labour? Socrates reminds us travel cannot offer us respite from ourselves: “How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself around with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away”. We do need to reconsider travel, and why we travel, in an age where our fragile climate is threatened by the carbon emissions of flights, where the infrastructure of over-touristed cities is collapsing under the weight of Euro summer pilgrimages, and where the divide between the wealthy and the poor becomes large enough to put literal oceans between them.
However, travel is a glimmer of hope that is becoming more accessible in a globalised society. Like Pyrrhus, we can set out to travel, conquer the rest of the world to no avail, or we can shrivel to a resigned point while feeling overburdened by the infinity of the earth. There are several versions of the famous anecdote about conqueror Alexander the Great, twisted by Hans Gruber in Die Hard as: “And Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer”. Another version, attributable to Plutarch, goes roughly like this: Hearing that there were innumerable worlds, Alexander wept: “Have I not good cause to weep, as there are infinite worlds and I am not yet the lord of one?” Both remind us there is no inherent achievement in going from place A to B.
