反对旅行的理由

#CM 现在旅行，拍照先行。 What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? 人们最喜欢说的不知所云的话是什么？ My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so. 我的提名是 "我喜欢旅行"。这句话对一个人的了解甚少，因为几乎每个人都喜欢旅行；但人们说这句话，是因为出于某种原因，他们既以曾经旅行过为荣，又以期待旅行为荣。 The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. 对方队员人数不多，但能言善辩。切斯特顿（G. K. Chesterton）写道："旅行会让人变得狭隘"。拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生称旅行为 "傻瓜的天堂"。苏格拉底和伊曼纽尔-康德--可以说是有史以来最伟大的两位哲学家--用脚投票，很少离开各自的家乡雅典和哥尼斯堡。 But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage: 但是，有史以来最痛恨旅行的人是葡萄牙作家费尔南多-佩索阿，他那本精彩的《不安之书》充满了愤怒： I abhor new ways of life and unfamiliar places. . . . The idea of travelling nauseates me. . . . 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. 我讨厌新的生活方式和陌生的地方。. . .旅行的想法让我恶心 .. .啊，让那些不存在的人去旅行吧！. . .旅行是为了那些没有感觉的人. .只有想象力极度贫乏的人，才有理由为了感受而四处奔波。 If you are inclined to dismiss this as contrarian posturing, try shifting the object of your thought from your own travel to that of others. 如果你倾向于认为这是在装腔作势，那就试着把你思考的对象从自己的旅行转移到别人的旅行上。 At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. 无论在国内还是在国外，人们都倾向于避免 "旅游 "活动。所谓 "旅游"，就是别人去旅游，我们也去旅游。 And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. 虽然人们喜欢谈论自己的旅行，但很少有人喜欢听他们说。 Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer. 这种谈话类似于学术著作和梦想报告：交流形式更多是受生产者而非消费者需求的驱动。 One common argument for travel is that it lifts us into an enlightened state, educating us about the world and connecting us to its denizens. Even Samuel Johnson, a skeptic—“What I gained by being in France was, learning to be better satisfied with my own country,” he once said—conceded that travel had a certain cachet. 旅行的一个常见理由是，它能让我们进入一种开明的状态，让我们了解世界，并将我们与世界的居民联系起来。就连塞缪尔-约翰逊（Samuel Johnson）这个怀疑论者--"我在法国的收获是学会更好地满足于我自己的国家"--也承认旅行有一定的魅力。 Advising his beloved Boswell, Johnson recommended a trip to China, for the sake of Boswell’s children: “There would be a lustre reflected upon them. . . . They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China.” 为了博斯韦尔的孩子们，约翰逊建议他心爱的博斯韦尔去中国旅行："他们身上会有一种光彩。. . ..他们在任何时候都会被看作是去瞻仰中国城墙的人的孩子"。 Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is? 旅行被打上了成就的烙印：看到有趣的地方，拥有有趣的经历，成为有趣的人。真的是这样吗？ Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. 佩索阿、爱默生和切斯特顿认为，旅行不仅没有让我们接触到人性，反而使我们脱离了人性。 Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveller’s delusion. 旅行让我们变成最糟糕的自己，却又让我们相信自己是最好的。这就是旅行者的错觉。 To explore it, let’s start with what we mean by “travel.” Socrates went abroad when he was called to fight in the Peloponnesian War; even so, he was no traveller. 要探讨这个问题，我们先来了解一下 "旅行 "的含义。苏格拉底应征参加伯罗奔尼撒战争时出过国，即便如此，他也不是旅行家。 Emerson is explicit about steering his critique away from a person who travels when his “necessities” or “duties” demand it. 爱默生明确指出，他的批判不是针对那些在 "必要 "或 "职责 "需要时才去旅行的人。 He has no objection to traversing great distances “for the purpose of art, of study, and benevolence.” One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it. 他不反对 "为了艺术、学习和仁慈的目的 "长途跋涉。你有理由去某个地方的一个标志是，你没有什么要证明的，因此也就没有动力去收集纪念品、照片或故事来证明这一点。 Let’s define “tourism” as the kind of travel that aims at the interesting—and, if Emerson and company are right, misses. 让我们把 "旅游 "定义为以有趣为目的的旅行--如果爱默生和他的公司是对的，那就是失误。 “A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? "旅游者是指为了体验变化而自愿到一个远离家乡的地方游览的暂时有收入的人"。这一定义摘自旅游人类学经典学术著作《主人与客人》的开篇。最后一句话至关重要：旅游是为了改变而存在的。但究竟是什么在改变呢？ Here is a telling observation from the concluding chapter of the same book: “Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, thus precipitating a chain of change in the host community.” We go to experience a change, but end up inflicting change on others. 以下是该书最后一章中的一个有说服力的观点："游客向东道主借钱的可能性小于东道主向游客借钱的可能性，从而在东道主社区引发一连串的变化"。我们去体验变化，但最终却把变化强加于他人。 For example, a decade ago, when I was in Abu Dhabi, I went on a guided tour of a falcon hospital. I took a photo with a falcon on my arm. 例如，十年前我在阿布扎比时，在导游的带领下参观了一家猎鹰医院。我手臂上挂着一只猎鹰，拍了一张照片。 I have no interest in falconry or falcons, and a generalized dislike of encounters with nonhuman animals. 我对猎鹰或猎鹰不感兴趣，而且普遍不喜欢接触非人类动物。 But the falcon hospital was one of the answers to the question, “What does one do in Abu Dhabi?” So I went. 但猎鹰医院是 "在阿布扎比能做什么？"这个问题的答案之一。所以我去了 I suspect that everything about the falcon hospital, from its layout to its mission statement, is and will continue to be shaped by the visits of people like me—we unchanged changers, we tourists. 我猜想，猎鹰医院的一切，从布局到使命宣言，都是并将继续由像我这样的人的访问所塑造--我们是不变的改变者，我们是游客。 (On the wall of the foyer, I recall seeing a series of “excellence in tourism” awards. Keep in mind that this is an animal hospital.) (我记得在门厅的墙上，我看到了一系列 "优秀旅游奖"）。请记住，这是一家动物医院）。 Why might it be bad for a place to be shaped by the people who travel there, voluntarily, for the purpose of experiencing a change? 为什么一个地方会被那些为了体验变化而自愿前往那里的人所塑造，这可能是坏事呢？ The answer is that such people not only do not know what they are doing but are not even trying to learn. Consider me. 答案是，这些人不仅不知道自己在做什么，而且根本没有努力学习。想想我自己吧。 It would be one thing to have such a deep passion for falconry that one is willing to fly to Abu Dhabi to pursue it, and it would be another thing to approach the visit in an aspirational spirit, with the hope of developing my life in a new direction. 对猎鹰运动怀有如此深厚的热情，以至于愿意飞到阿布扎比去追求它，这是一回事，而以一种向往的精神来对待这次访问，希望将我的生活引向一个新的方向，这又是另一回事。 I was in neither position. I entered the hospital knowing that my post-Abu Dhabi life would contain exactly as much falconry as my pre-Abu Dhabi life—which is to say, zero falconry. 我的情况都不是这样。我进入医院时就知道，我在阿布扎比之后的生活将和我在阿布扎比之前的生活一样--也就是说，没有猎鹰。 If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting. 如果你要去看一些你既不看重也不渴望看重的东西，那么除了火车头之外，你并没有做什么。 Tourism is marked by its locomotive character. “I went to France.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to the Louvre.” O.K., but what did you do there? “I went to see the ‘Mona Lisa.’ ” That is, before quickly moving on: apparently, many people spend just fifteen seconds looking at the “Mona Lisa.” It’s locomotion all the way down. 旅游具有火车头的特征。"我去了法国"好吧，但你在那里做了什么？"我去了卢浮宫"好吧，但你在那里做了什么？"我去看了'蒙娜丽莎'"那是在快速移动之前：显然，很多人只花了 15 秒钟就看完了 "蒙娜丽莎"。这就是运动的全部。 The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do. 游客特有的理性使他们既希望在一个地方做他们应该做的事，又希望避免他们应该做的事。 This is how it came to pass that, on my first trip to Paris, I avoided both the “Mona Lisa” and the Louvre. I did not, however, avoid locomotion. 因此，我第一次去巴黎时，避开了 "蒙娜丽莎 "和卢浮宫。不过，我并没有避开交通工具。 I walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk. 我从城市的一端走到另一端，一次又一次，走成一条直线；如果把我走过的路画在地图上，它们会形成一个巨大的星号。 In the many great cities I have actually lived and worked in, I would never consider spending whole days walking. 在我实际生活和工作过的许多大城市中，我从未考虑过花一整天时间步行。 When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. 当你旅行时，你会暂缓你对有价值的时间使用的一贯标准。 You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities. 你也会暂停其他标准，不愿受制于自己对食物、艺术或娱乐活动的品味。 After all, you say to yourself, the whole point of travelling is to break out of the confines of everyday life. 毕竟，你对自己说，旅行的意义就在于打破日常生活的束缚。 But, if you usually avoid museums, and suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the paintings? 但是，如果你通常都不去博物馆，而突然为了体验变化而去博物馆，你会如何看待这些画作呢？ You might as well be in a room full of falcons. 你还不如待在一个满是猎鹰的房间里。 Let’s delve a bit deeper into how, exactly, the tourist’s project is self-undermining. 让我们深入探讨一下，游客的项目究竟是如何自我毁灭的。 I’ll illustrate with two examples from “The Loss of the Creature,” an essay by the writer Walker Percy. 我将用作家沃克-珀西的散文《失去的生物》中的两个例子来说明。 First, a sightseer arriving at the Grand Canyon. Before his trip, an idea of the canyon—a “symbolic complex”—had formed in his mind. 首先，一位观光者来到了大峡谷。在旅行之前，他的脑海中已经形成了一个关于峡谷的概念--一个 "象征性的综合体"。 He is delighted if the canyon resembles the pictures and postcards he has seen; he might even describe it as “every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” But, if the lighting is different, the colors and shadows not those which he expects, he feels cheated: he has arrived on a bad day. 如果峡谷与他所看到的图片和明信片相似，他就会很高兴；他甚至会形容峡谷 "和明信片上的图片一样美！"但是，如果光线不一样，颜色和阴影与他想象的不一样，他就会觉得被欺骗了：他来的不是时候。 Unable to gaze directly at the canyon, forced to judge merely whether it matches an image, the sightseer “may simply be bored; or he may be conscious of the difficulty: that the great thing yawning at his feet somehow eludes him.” 观光者无法直接凝视峡谷，只能判断它是否与图像相符，"他可能只是感到无聊；或者他可能意识到了困难：在他脚下打哈欠的伟大事物不知何故躲开了他"。 Second, a couple from Iowa driving around Mexico. They are enjoying the trip, but are a bit dissatisfied by the usual sights. 第二，一对来自爱荷华州的夫妇驾车环游墨西哥。他们很享受这次旅行，但对常见的景点有些不满。 They get lost, drive for hours on a rocky mountain road, and eventually, “in a tiny valley not even marked on the map,” stumble upon a village celebrating a religious festival. 他们迷了路，在多石的山路上行驶了几个小时，最终，"在一个地图上都没有标注的小山谷里"，他们偶然发现了一个正在庆祝宗教节日的村庄。 Watching the villagers dance, the tourists finally have “an authentic sight, a sight which is charming, quaint, picturesque, unspoiled.” Yet they still feel some dissatisfaction. 看着村民们的舞蹈，游客们终于 "看到了一个真实的景象，一个迷人的、古朴的、如诗如画的、未受污染的景象"。然而，他们仍然感到有些不满。 Back home in Iowa, they gush about the experience to an ethnologist friend: You should have been there! You must come back with us! 回到爱荷华州的家中，他们向一位民族学家朋友津津乐道于这次经历：你应该去那里的你一定要和我们一起回去！ When the ethnologist does, in fact, return with them, “the couple do not watch the goings-on; instead they watch the ethnologist! 当民族学家真的和他们一起回来时，"这对夫妇并没有观看发生的事情，而是观看民族学家！ Their highest hope is that their friend should find the dance interesting.” They need him to “certify their experience as genuine.” 他们最希望的是，他们的朋友能发现舞蹈的趣味性"。他们需要他 "证明他们的经历是真实的"。 The tourist is a deferential character. 游客是一个恭顺的角色。 He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. 他把证明自己经历的工作外包给了民族学家、明信片以及关于在一个地方应该做什么或不应该做什么的传统智慧。 This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience. Emerson confessed, “I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. 这种敬畏，这种 "对体验的开放"，恰恰使游客无法体验。爱默生承认："我追求梵蒂冈和宫殿。 I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated.” He speaks for every tourist who has stood before a monument, or a painting, or a falcon, and demanded herself to feel something. 我沉醉于美景和建议，但我并没有陶醉。他的话代表了每一位站在纪念碑、绘画或猎鹰面前，要求自己有所感悟的游客的心声。 Emerson and Percy help us understand why this demand is unreasonable: to be a tourist is to have already decided that it is not one’s own feelings that count. 爱默生和珀西帮助我们理解了为什么这种要求是不合理的：作为一名游客，就意味着已经决定了自己的感受并不重要。 Whether an experience is authentically X is precisely what you, as a non-X, cannot judge. 作为一个非 X 的人，你恰恰无法判断某种体验是否是真正的 X。 A similar argument applies to the tourist’s impulse to honor the grand sea of humanity. 类似的论点也适用于游客向人类的大海洋致敬的冲动。 Whereas Percy and Emerson focus on the aesthetic, showing us how hard it is for travellers to have the sensory experiences that they seek, Pessoa and Chesterton are interested in the ethical. 珀西和爱默生侧重于审美，向我们展示了旅行者获得他们所追求的感官体验有多么困难，而佩索阿和切斯特顿则对伦理感兴趣。 They study why travellers can’t truly connect to other human beings. 他们研究为什么旅行者无法真正与其他人建立联系。 During my Paris wanderings, I would stare at people, intently inspecting their clothing, their demeanor, their interactions. 在巴黎闲逛时，我会盯着人们，仔细观察他们的衣着、举止和互动。 I was trying to see the Frenchness in the French people around me. This is not a way to make friends. 我试图从身边的法国人身上看到法国人的影子。这可不是交朋友的方式。 Pessoa said that he knew only one “real traveller with soul”: an office boy who obsessively collected brochures, tore maps out of newspapers, and memorized train schedules between far-flung destinations. 佩索阿说，他只认识一个 "真正有灵魂的旅行者"：一个办公室男孩，他痴迷于收集宣传册，撕报纸上的地图，背诵遥远目的地之间的火车时刻表。 The boy could recount sailing routes around the world, but he had never left Lisbon. Chesterton also approved of such stationary travellers. 这个男孩可以讲述环游世界的航海路线，但他从未离开过里斯本。切斯特顿也赞同这种固定的旅行者。 He wrote that there was “something touching and even tragic” about “the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like.” 他写道，"那些漫不经心的游客 "有 "一些感人甚至是悲剧性的东西"，"在汉普斯特德或苏比顿，他们本可以待在家里爱着拉普兰人，拥抱中国人，把巴塔哥尼亚人紧紧抱在怀里，但他却盲目地、自杀性地冲动着要去看看他们长什么样"。 The problem was not with other places, or with the man wanting to see them, but with travel’s dehumanizing effect, which thrust him among people to whom he was forced to relate as a spectator. 问题不在于其他地方，也不在于他想去看看，而在于旅行的非人化效应，它把他推到了那些他不得不以旁观者身份与之相处的人中间。 Chesterton believed that loving what is distant in the proper fashion—namely, from a distance—enabled a more universal connection. 切斯特顿认为，以适当的方式--即从远处--去爱遥远的事物，能够建立一种更普遍的联系。 When the man in Hampstead thought of foreigners “in the abstract . . . as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them.” “The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion,” Chesterton wrote. 当汉普斯特德的那个人 "抽象地……把外国人看成是那些劳作、爱自己的孩子并死去的人 "时，他想到的是关于他们的基本事实。"切斯特顿写道："他在家中感受到的人类纽带并非幻觉。 “It is rather an inner reality.” Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have travelled such great distances to be near. "这是一种内在的真实"。旅行让我们无法感受到远道而来的亲人的存在。 The single most important fact about tourism is this: we already know what we will be like when we return. 关于旅游最重要的一个事实是：我们已经知道自己回来时会是什么样子。 A vacation is not like immigrating to a foreign country, or matriculating at a university, or starting a new job, or falling in love. 度假不像移民外国，也不像大学入学，更不像开始新的工作或恋爱。 We embark on those pursuits with the trepidation of one who enters a tunnel not knowing who she will be when she walks out. 我们怀着惶恐不安的心情开始这些追求，就像进入隧道时不知道自己走出隧道时会是谁一样。 The traveller departs confident that she will come back with the same basic interests, political beliefs, and living arrangements. Travel is a boomerang. 旅行者出发时坚信，她会带着同样的基本兴趣、政治信仰和生活安排回来。旅行是一种回旋镖。 It drops you right where you started. 它让你原地踏步。 If you think that this doesn’t apply to you—that your own travels are magical and profound, with effects that deepen your values, expand your horizons, render you a true citizen of the globe, and so on—note that this phenomenon can’t be assessed first-personally. 如果你认为这对你不适用--你自己的旅行是神奇而深刻的，它能深化你的价值观，扩大你的视野，使你成为真正的世界公民，等等--请注意，这种现象不能以第一人称来评估。 Pessoa, Chesterton, Percy, and Emerson were all aware that travellers tell themselves they’ve changed, but you can’t rely on introspection to detect a delusion. So cast your mind, instead, to any friends who are soon to set off on summer adventures. 佩索阿、切斯特顿、珀西和爱默生都知道，旅行者会告诉自己他们已经变了，但你不能依靠自省来发现错觉。因此，请把目光投向那些即将踏上夏日冒险之旅的朋友们吧。 In what condition do you expect to find them when they return? 您希望他们回来时是什么状态？ 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? 他们可能会把自己的旅行说成是 "一生一次 "的蜕变经历，但你能注意到他们的行为、信仰和道德观有什么不同吗？ Will there be any difference at all? 会有任何区别吗？ Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. 旅行是一种乐趣，所以我们喜欢旅行并不神秘。神秘的是，我们为什么要赋予它巨大的意义和美德的光环。 If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning? 如果度假只是追求一成不变的变化，是对虚无的拥抱，那又何必坚持它的意义呢？ One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. 人们不得不得出这样的结论：也许什么都不做并不那么容易--这就为我们提出了一个解决难题的办法。 Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. 想象一下，如果你发现自己再也不能旅行了，你的生活会是什么样子。 If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. 如果你不打算对生活做出重大改变，那么这种前景就会让你感到恐惧，因为 "这样的生活会越来越多，然后我就死了"。旅行将这漫长的时间分割成旅行前和旅行后的两部分，遮蔽了毁灭的确定性。 And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. 它以最巧妙的方式做到了这一点：让你预感到这一点。你不愿意去想有一天你会一事无成，成为无名小卒。 You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it. 只有当你把这种体验伪装成你正在做许多令人兴奋和有益的事情时，你才会允许自己预览这种体验：你正在体验，你正在联系，你正在转变，而且你有饰品和照片来证明这一点。 Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel. ♦ 苏格拉底说，哲学是为死亡做准备。对其他人来说，则是旅行。♦