Lost in the Cosmos

travel.
    Three people take a bus tour of Mexico.
    The bus breaks down and the tourists have to make an unscheduled stop, an old abandoned monastery converted to a questionable hotel by a questionable hotelier, like Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana.
    Traveler A is unhappy. She paid for certain accommodations and expects them. Things have gone awry. She makes everyone miserable with her complaints.
    Traveler B is delighted. Having set great store by this trip, he is disappointed by its routineness, by Latinized Holiday Inns, by condo-rimmed beaches, by his boring fellow tourists. Now the unexpected happens. He feels he has left the beaten path. With satisfaction he surveys his new lodgings, a monk’s cell with adobe walls yea thick—he tells his friends later—and a single window overlooking a lush jungle. An adventure. What next?
    Traveler C is neither happy nor unhappy. She knows all about standard bus tours of Mexico and she knows all about the unhappiness of Traveler A. But she also knows all about the happiness of Traveler B and the getting-off-the-beaten-path syndrome. In fact, she’s even heard of certain tours where “breakdowns” and “wrong turns” by wayward buses are prearranged. There are any number of converted monasteries in Mexico ministering to this new spiritual need. Yet she wants to make the tour, if only to get away and be let alone, and with minimal expectations. In fact, it is the very ordinariness of the tour and the ordinariness of the breakdown which she enjoys. She cultivates the routine as such. Rather than watch the picturesque Mexicans, she finds herself watching her fellow tourists watching the picturesque Mexicans. Joan Didion immortalized Traveler C.
    Question: Do you identify with one traveler more than with the others? If you do, are there objective grounds for your preference?
    (a) I might identify with one or another traveler but it is a subjective choice depending on one’s own experience—how many Mexican bus tours you’ve made, your life situation, and so on. One might be looking for adventure, sex, who knows?—or perhaps one has a rotten job and a rotten marriage and so may want nothing more than a mindless hiatus, so that it doesn’t matter whether the bus is lost or found or touring Mexico or Ireland. It’s too bad that A is unhappy, it is nice that B is happy, and a matter of indifference that C is neither. But what more is there to say?
    (b) No, an objective judgment of sorts can be made. Traveler A is a nerd, your sub-ordinary unreflective American tourist, not to be identified with and certainly not to be preferred. B is better off, but not much. C knows this, and though she may not be happy and may not have any expectations, she is nevertheless to be preferred to A or B. For she is at least coming to the end of her rope, the same rope A and B have hold of, and will at least find out what is at the end. It is better to know than not to know.
    ( CHECK ONE )

    The expectations of the autonomous self, to be informed in its nothingness—if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person—pins a quasi-religious hope on, of all things, travel.
    It is notable that when travel as a recreation mode is experienced vicariously through the media, it undergoes a shift toward the erotic. The old film travelogues of the 1930s give way to TV’s The Love Boat and Fantasy Island, where the boat of the former is an instrument not of travel but of liaison, and the fantasies of the latter are not insular but sexual.
    It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence.
    The passivity of TV and film watching contrasts with the violence with which the watcher identifies.
    The two most popular film stars in the world are Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson. Each kills a great many people in each movie, the former casually, the latter by way of revenge.
    Scene from A Few Dollars More: Clint Eastwood is a bounty hunter who is after a wanted man for the reward. As he closes in on his quarry in a saloon, three friends of the wanted