La frase “Amo viaggiare” quanto realmente racconta della personalità di chi la pronuncia? Agnes Callard sulle pagine del New Yorker sostiene (link alternativo) che questa frase sia poco più che una vanteria. E racconta come ci siano persone che invece non amano affatto il viaggio e illustri personaggi che addirittura lo detestano.

Pessoa, Emerson e Chesterton, tra gli altri, credevano che viaggiare, invece di metterci in contatto con l’umanità, ci separasse da essa e ci peggiorasse, proprio mentre ci illudevamo di arricchirci. La Callard la chiama “l’illusione del viaggiatore”.

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. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage: “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.”

E se si smette di pensare ai nostri viaggi e ci si concentra su quelli degli altri si scoprono alcune contraddizioni.

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. At home or abroad, one tends to avoid “touristy” activities. “Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it. And, although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.

Il viaggio permetterebbe di vedere luoghi interessanti, fare esperienze interessanti, diventare persone interessanti. Ma è davvero così? Queste le conclusioni di Agnes Callard:

One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. 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. 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. 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. Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

Ad Agnes Callard risponde, senza giri di parole, Jill Filipovic sulle pagine di The Guardian in un articolo nel quale sostiene che viaggiare per molti non è soltanto meraviglioso, ma essenziale.

There are all kinds of people on this weird and wild planet, with all kinds of bizarre and out-of-the-ordinary habits and preferences. Some of those people don’t like to travel. It seems Agnes Callard and the many cranky writers she quotes are among them. If it suits them, they should lean into their impulse toward the familiar and the self, and they should stay home and examine their own navels, or disappear into their imaginations. That’s all good – it means fewer tourists crowding the streets, and certainly less stress on a taxed planet.

E, analizzando i vari modi in cui viaggiare ci rende felici, Jill Filipovic conclude così:

Travel isn’t a magical tool that by itself makes us happy and sophisticated, evolved and capable. Like anything else some people (even many people) find pleasurable, it’s not for everyone. But perhaps travel could be useful even for those who feel the most challenged by it. I’m sure it’s lovely to live within the vast expanse of one’s own imagination. But the vast expanse of planet earth, and all the different ways humans live on it, offer a kind of inspiration you can’t find in your own head alone. By leaving our comfortable places, little by little we – hopefully – see the world with more wonder and offer other people more patience, generosity and tolerance than we would if we simply stayed home.