Because I care
No one has time to do what they do and read the stuff I point to here. Sometimes I see something that I think of later and if it's good, it goes on the links bar over yonder. --->Other times these things lie around my brain keeping the corners warm, like this little piece of an article byDavid Foster Wallace on the Maine lobster festival. This is a sub-part of that article, not even in the main body:
As I see it, it probably is really good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place or context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, of living somehow outside and above it all. (Coming up is the part that my companions find especially unhappy and repellent, a sure way to spoil the fun of vacation travel:) To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you can not ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.
That somehow cheers me up, in the same way as a good Zippy the pinhead, or a good The cardboard valise. Today at school I wound up breaking my workpiece; I might as well not have gone in. I wish it had happened a little sooner. It's natural for this to occur, I suppose. Tomorrow will be better.
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