The many facets of travel

The word “travel” evokes automatically the idea of escape from everyday life. This illusion stems from the tourism, the contemporary version of the time-honored tradition of the Grand Tour. But traveling is something else than that: it is the drive that fueled the global affirmation of Western culture. The motives may range from restlessness or curiosity (Montaigne once described travel as “rubbing one’s brain against those of other people”) to sordid greed. The heroic insanity of history’s great seafarers hardly ever concealed the desire to rob all-too-often powerless peoples of their fabulous riches. In the best instances, explorers have helped impose their countries’ ideas of civilization on primitive cultures. Thus, in the course of history, many otherwise legitimate missions have been undertaken by a number of peoples based on an extension—often a distortion—of the meaning of “travel”. But now that the whole world has been explored and there are no uncharted territories left, it is time to rethink the many facets of travel so as to foster greater individual awareness and a disinterested understanding of different civilizations.