A long time ago, before the Internet and blogging came along, I made a few sketchy notes for a short story about a travel writer who had been to one too many a spot in the world. Weary and having come to believe that there is no such thing as place, he thinks of his travel diaries as obituaries. Still, he must go on to earn a living, so he picks up a young waitress to travel with him, someone, a travel virgin of sorts, whose imagination and eyes might still be intact.
OK, so you may be wondering what happens next in the story.... Well, I had no idea where these two would end up back then, and now, after the years of traveling across the highly idiosyncratic “spaces” of the blogosphere, my fixation with the unique tethers of place have waned considerably. The weary travel writer, if I think of him now, is probably wondering how to hang on to whatever job he has, save for his retirement and for a college funds for his kids. The very kids he probably had with the waitress with the virgin eyes, who now would like nothing better than to travel, but can't because, well, she's tethered.
The Internet and blogging have left my imaginary travel writer and his waitress in the pixel dust, but not some of my ideas about the near impossibility of experiencing place as something visceral. Of course, when I say place here, I think of the agora, the archetypal meeting place where we humans gather, a construct in physical form and in ideas. In that, it is important to remember that place is, after all, a social construct grafted over the terrain.
Since the rise of the Internet and blogging, I have been to a lot of places, some of which I ended up visiting in flesh, so to speak. But when I arrived to one of these places, it was never for the first time: my mind had already explored it, in some cases learning more about some of its details then it knows about what goes on literally in my own backyard. My senses, a little dulled in the flicker of monitors and a steady diet of international cuisine to be had with only a short drive to any market or restaurant within blocks, had no choice but go along for the ride.
I would like to tell my weary travel writer that the problem is not that there are no places left, but that with our appetites piqued continuously by the idea of the global, we have become indiscriminately senseless.
