Seeing Through Stones
When we travel, we tend to see stones, less so people. We flock to cathedrals, museums and monuments and marvel at the wisdom and will of the ancients who expressed their beliefs and social structures in granite, marble and limestone. We equate stone objects with the cultures we explore.
The people who live amid these stones, in modern cities, are more inscrutable. They travel from home to work and to market in real time. Travelers exist on a different time track, and it is easy for them to see natives only as a blur. Our cultural biases further promote dismissal: The natives are odd and rude, they don’t speak our language or eat our foods, and, well, let’s not even mention their plumbing.
So we are drawn to stones, well-placed stones that have stayed put for centuries, sometimes millennia. They shape space and form boundaries. They reflect human aspirations, a prime example being the cathedral.
But stones are neither blank nor silent.
If we look closely, we can, in a metaphoric sense, see through stones to encounter the stories they tell. The stones of Paris, stacked into walls and shaped into buildings, hold a multitude of stories that coalesce into narratives and myths. These include the quest for equality, the triumph of reason over faith, the quest to express love, passion and beauty. These narratives and myths are not sealed in the past. They live on in a neural network that connects all historic ages of the city in simultaneity.
The stories of Paris remain vibrant, and Parisians of the past who retold them over generations are palpably present and wonderfully conversant with us today. If we only can see through stones.
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Wall of Philippe Auguste, 1190
So On to Time...
In our everyday lives, we give little notice to time, but traveling is all about time. We travel within a set time frame, often to places where we step back in time. Remarkably, time seems to slow as we cram our schedules with visits to churches, museums, shops and restaurants. And as we age, we measure the times in our lives by memories of past travels.
Travelers tend to think about time in terms of limits. First, we have a habit of traveling for seven days (the vacation week). As a result, we closely allocate time for gleanings: “Tuesday, we ‘take in’ the Louvre.” Note, we don’t say we “understand” the Louvre, impossible in a day. We have a “Louvre experience,” and it lasts a day, or shorter if we give in to the weary whiners in our traveling party.
In our family, a visit to Paris with teenaged daughters demonstrated that time is relative to the perceived value of the experience. For our daughters, an hour at Parc Monceau, suffering Dad’s commentary on Haussmann’s crime of sacrificing public green space for luxury private housing, was foreshortened so we could spend three delightful hours of clothes shopping at Galleries Lafayette. (Dad found the book department and promptly lost all track of time.)
In human history, travel was initially bound by time, according to season and climate—and hunger. Humans, being hunters and gatherers, traveled to “follow the food.” As agrarian communities and urban centers developed, human movement was driven by economics, climate, religion and politics. These factors spurred migrations, diasporas, pilgrimages and crusades, and these, in turn, created conquerors and slaves, refugees and expatriates.
In the European realm, travel differed by station in life. The French monarchy, before it was centered at the Louvre and then Versailles, was almost continually in motion. The monarch traveled with his servants and court in an enormous caravan from chateau to chateau to maintain visibility across the French nation. For peasants, migration travel from country to city accelerated by the 16th-18th centuries.
Cultural travel emerged separately as an aristocratic practice, an expression of cultural fluency. The “grand tour” of Europe (France, Germany, Italy and Greece) capped the education of a young scholar of means before commencing a career. Such travel was measured in months or even years.
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Clocktower, Conciergerie
The Travel Excursion
The 19th century saw the emergence of the travel excursion (e.g. the Cook’s tour), accelerated by the development of railroads. Notably, Thomas Cook, founder of Thomas Cook & Son, was deeply committed to the teetotaler movement, and his excursions were designed, in part, to keep idled workers out of the pubs on Sundays. One of his first excursions was to a teetotaler gathering; far-more scenic destinations followed. This form of “tourist” travel was measured in a day, or just several days.
Longer excursions were designed for exhibitions in Paris, London and elsewhere that showcased astonishing new technology that would deliver a brighter future. The excursion “package” (with the group sharing the expense of booking a train, meals and lodgings) lowered the cost of travel and democratized it. As leisure time increased, the excursion set working people in motion and broke down class barriers. “Good God!” says a British elite in an anecdote of traveling in France. “What if I am admiring a painting in the Louvre and my tailor walks by!” Meaning, he might have to acknowledge his tailor and speak to him as if a peer, equally “at leisure.”
Americans jumped into the mix in the 19th century, making the “further journey” to Europe by steamship, and Paris was a prime destination. There, Americans could edify themselves in classical and modern culture and arts, and also marvel at advances in medicine, aerial flight and photography. Of course, they also could indulge in shopping for luxuries known as articles de Paris or Paris goods, regarded as the world’s finest.
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Tour, Versailles
Travelers and Tourists
Over the 19th century, the distinction widened between tourists (those “on a tour”) and travelers. Travelers took on airs and viewed tourists as nuisances, ignoramuses, a lowly life form addressed as “herds” and “plagues.” Class bias and racism loomed large in this regard. Witness the past half-century, with the caricature of Japanese tourists (“cameras with feet”) who relied on services back in Tokyo to identify the stack of photos they had hurriedly snapped. They were followed by Chinese tourists who lined up behind the velvet rope at Chanel on the Champs Elysées, credit cards in hand.
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n America, the “Green Book” of the Jim Crow era listed segregated venues in a system that rendered African-American tourists marginal, almost invisible. In contrast, the Kodak-toting caucasian family was ubiquitous. The iconic family vacation photo: Junior, Ginny and Mom (holding her bag), lined up in front of the Grand Canyon, backs to the view.
Then came low-cost airline flights, which reduced access to the world to hours, as well as cruise ships, ever more super-sized and attraction-laden. In a recent visit to Greece, we were relaxing on our sunny veranda when a cry went up: “Cruise ship!” An enormous vessel pulling into the calderón signaled that hundreds of boat tourists would invade our peaceful village, jam noisily into shops and pick shelves clean like locusts sweeping through an orchard. (Mea culpa, the animal and plague reference.)
Between tourists and travelers, the latter cleaves to elitism and casts a jaundiced glance at the former. Evelyn Waugh was spot on: “Every Englishman abroad, until proven to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveler and not a tourist.”
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Suitcases, ancienne travel implements
Bucket Listers and Bubblers
One notion of travel in current vogue is that of a ‘bucket list” with destinations and attractions to be checked off before one’s life expires, to put it bluntly. This diminishes the nature of travel from a search for differentness and discovery to having “meta-experiences” that square with expectations set by a four-para synopsis in Lonely Planet.
Bucket-listing dovetails into social media travel, where followers tag along virtually. Often, the back-home cohorts already have traveled an identical “experience route” or soon will, checking off “must-do” beach clubs in Mykonos, hot bistros in Mayfair, and chic shops on rue des Francs Bourgeois. This is travel “within the bubble."
There are rules to bubble travel. For those who closely curate their social media presence or even base a profession on it, travel experiences must be promptly posted on Instagram, TikTok or Facebook. A sense of dashing fashionability can be added with photo-enhancing and geo-locators. Preferably, videos abound, as per the axiom: “If there’s no video, it didn’t happen.” And if posted on Instagram Stories, it “happens” only for a day, then poof. In this form of travel, time is an imposing participant. In fact, the social media traveler must allocate significant time away from travel experiences to annotate their travel experiences and relate them to social media “markers” (“the hottest club in Ibiza”).
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Shakespeare and Company
Time, Space and Travel
In physics, time is regarded as the “fourth coordinate” of the time-space continuum. That is, space has length, width and height…and also time. Without hurting the reader’s (or this writer’s) brain with a deep-dive into physics, here is the skinny: “The observed rate at which time passes for an object depends on the object’s velocity relative to the observer.” Further, “General relativity also provides an explanation of how gravitational fields can slow the passage of time for an object as seen by an observer outside the field.” (Wikipedia).
It would be wonderful to spend a month in Provence with Albert Einstein as a traveling companion to learn more about this subject. But suffice it to say that the issues of time and space loom hugely when we travel.
As noted, interactions between travelers and natives often are limited by differing senses of time. The native lives in a working-world time. Says the Parisian with ennui: “metro, boulot, dodo…” (commute, work, sleep). In contrast, the traveler, temporarily freed from their own rat race, exists in rarefied vacation-week time. There, time seems bountiful and enriched, and life is filled with possibilities. Witness Clark Griswold on National Lampoon’s European Vacation, sitting in a Paris cafe, sporting his newly purchased beret and gushing: “Oh, I just want to write, I want to paint….”
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Bistrot, Le Marais
Digital Time Warps
Digital devices and premium services facilitate travel but also bend time perceptions while constraining spontaneity in human interactions. Airbnb, HomeAway and other alternative lodgers provide the opportunity for shared-home encounters that feed the dream of a global village. No doubt, there is some of that; my personal experience is that hosts run the gamut from kumbaya to fast-buck, and guests fall on the budget-seeking side. I am not judging; technology is welcome when it allows us to stretch a dollar and travel more and with greater ease.
Uber and Lyft also provide travelers with culture-bridging choices: A passenger can gab with a driver, freed from watching the meter and the messy business of face-to-face payment and tipping. Alternately, they can turn inward and be mute to the native. Your phone does the communicating and insulates you from human interaction.
Tripadvisor and Yelp further the democratization of travel with the simplicity of 1-5 consumer ratings, even as they standardize expectations and limit serendipity.
Covid pandemic has accelerated dependence on smart phones. In restaurants, we use phones from reservations to menu to payment. The first question to a wait person is no longer “Bonjour!” but rather, “What is your Wi-Fi? password?” In many foreign destinations, the traveler hardly needs to exchange money. In fact, it’s easy not to notice what one spends—a marketer’s dream. But this increases human isolation: No one hands you a menu, an airline ticket, change from buying bread.
Another agent of convenience/alienation: priority status for airline, hotel and rental car loyalty. Travelers can raid their points vault or flash a priority program on a phone app to enjoy a fluid succession of upgrades that mitigate contact with the riffraff. Priority travelers don’t wait in lines at the airport, they sequester in a restricted lounge. Upon landing, their luggage is first-out, and they get the jump on the unwashed masses as pre-arranged drivers whisk them to their hotel where (via their profile) their favorite type of pillows are pre-fluffed. But over time, priority travel takes on the same luxurious veneer and isolates one from genuine experiences. Travel challenges, like arranging a hard-to-get restaurant reservation, are handled by a concierge.
Priority travelers hop from one destination to another with a repeating set of comforts, as if their home comes with them—as did the Medieval French monarchs whose caravans ferried along their own bed and furniture. However, as priority programs become ever more competitive, upgrading priority programs becomes…a priority. Otherwise, (to cite an earlier example) you might bump into your tailor on a skip-the-line tour at the Louvre.
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St. Germain des Prés
Layers of History
Whether tourist or traveler, we all negotiate layers of historic time as we travel. In Rome, we turn a corner and slip between time: We go from dodging motorinis a la La Dolce Vita to collecting our bread and circus in Ancient Rome. At Chichen Itza, we struggle to contemplate the grandiosity of a city and a sophisticated culture that flourished and then disappeared while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages. At the Grand Canyon, we stand and stare, trying to wrap our minds around the ineffability of geological time in relation to the minuteness of human history.
Some travelers tend to create two artificial time eras, ancient and modern—ancient implying dead and modern implying superior and enlightened. But if we are observant, we recognize that ancient narratives abound in the modern world, as alive and unresolved as ever. We simply manage to ignore them, shrink-wrapping the past in the past.
Alternately, we offer a chagrined sense of resignation about the persistence of vestiges, saying: Plus ca change, le plus c’est la meme choses…. The more things change, the more they remain the same, another way of saying there is no progress in human history.
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Antiquity, Musée Carnavalet
A Fluid Sense of Time
The binary divide between ancient and modern time limits our understanding of a major monument like Notre Dame de Paris—which is both ancient and modern in several regards. Its stones were laid over centuries, during which time architectural styles changed from Romanesque to Gothic, rendering the massive cathedral a hybrid. Surface changes also were made, notably as returning Crusaders introduced Byzantine flourishes that had seen in the Levant. “Time is the architect,” observed Victor Hugo of Notre Dame’s changing fashions, “the whole of the people the builders."
Today, Parisians (joined by Francophiles around the world) are embroiled in a querelle over what Notre Dame should look like following its post-fire restoration and, in fact, how the restoration should take place. Should the nouveau Notre Dame incorporate modern elements (as were added in the 19th century restoration) or be purely a replication of the original design (which was never exactly carried out)? After 850 years, Notre Dame still is being built, refashioned and argued over in a clash of religious, secular, nostalgic and futuristic narratives.
If we accept a more fluid sense of time (as did Einstein in observing the flexibility of time while riding in a street car past the Bern town clock) we can consider that time is made relative by motion. This is confirmed by astronauts who return from high-speed space voyages to find their watches running a fraction of a second slower than time on Earth. Extrapolating this notion massively, we might consider further that all events in history are, in fact, occurring all at once. That’s a heady notion, but we can assume for our purposes here that time is a profound factor in travel and is relative to experience, viewpoint and perception.
In our own lives, we can observe this in a few simple exercises. At home, if you want to know how your neighbors live, get out of your car and walk around the block; the observations of walker (at 2mph) differ remarkably from those of a driver (at 30mph).”Who knew Sonya keeps chickens?”
When traveling, say for a week’s visit to Paris, try keeping a journal of everything you do, then look back: The week seems like a month. Our perception is altered by several factors: We over-stuff our schedule, we observe so many new and different things, and (in this exercise) we write it all down and note our observations. These include small differences and customs, little quirks that tax our attention and—in the best case—fill us with wide-eyed wonder. The richness of these experiences sends us on a time warp to childhood and the amazement of seeing something for the first time. The overall sensory overload skews our perception of time.
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Pont Royal, the Louvre
Time and Revelation
For the traveler, the critical observations made in altered time can reveal deep social structures in a foreign culture. Anthropologists warn, however, against making broad universal claims (“The French are rude, Italians cheeky.”). And beware the happy traveler who has seen revelations of world harmony (“All people are alike, food differs.”). They are like nightclubbers on Ecstasy; they see love everywhere.
Claude Levi-Strauss also took a dim view of universalism: Modern society, he said, was far too complex for such generalizations. Roland Barthes called this “the disease of thinking in essences.” Some structuralists, in particular, disagree. These deep structures, like truffles, are there to be dug up. And so, here is another typically French querelle, an extended formal argument that offers no resolution but generates multiple book deals.
Seeking epiphanies is hardly a reasonable goal for a seven-day vacation. But even a casual traveler can consider the issues of antiquity that play out as historical narratives that never are resolved (e.g. the quest for equality vs. the avarice in human nature). These issues continue to challenge us each and every day.
Rousseau defined the authority of the state over consenting individuals in The Social Contract in 1762, and that same issue is loudly tested now in COVID times by anti-mask demonstrators across France. The 2022 presidential election that saw centrist Emanuel Macron triumph over populist Marine Le Pen, brought to the fore the issue of laïcité or the mandated separation of religion from governmental affairs—something “settled” more than a century ago.
Or not.
Lesson: Never take democracy for granted. Each generation must choose anew whether to live in a jungle or a society.
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Precious light in a Parisian sky