“The Saddest Of Pleasures”

It’s Sunday here in southern Italy; and I’m thinking of what novelist, intrepid traveler and prolific travel writer Paul Theroux has written: “It’s true that travel is the saddest of pleasures, the long-distance overland blues.”  He has witnessed, many times, what I have only glimpsed…..namely, that if one’s eyes are really open, the traveler will very often see a mean and ugly world.

From a lifetime of intentional, investigative travel, Theroux concludes (In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star): “Most people on earth are poor. Most places are blighted and nothing will stop them from getting worse…..there are too many people and an enormous number of them spend their hungry days thinking about America as the Mother Ship…..Most of the world is worsening, shrinking to a ball of bungled desolation. Only the old can really see how gracelessly the world is aging and all that we have lost. Politicians are always inferior to their citizens. No one on earth is well governed.”

Which suggests to me that God should have rested one day earlier….. after five days, not six…..before He created  humans and gave them dominion over every other living thing on earth.

I’m among those Theroux would consider old enough to see that there are few if any nations on earth — including the USA — where the powerful have not preyed on the powerless. Where there has not been violence in the name of religion. Where war has not been waged on that nation’s own residents, its neighbors or beyond…..often accompanied by unspeakable atrocities. Where poverty and pollution are not worsening. Where hunger and homelessness are not increasing. Where the most basic human rights of some group of people are not being trampled by another group.

Travel — as opposed to vacations or tourism — exposes this. And it’s important that it does.

JER