June 28 2023
substack.sashafrerejones.com
An Agnes Callard essay on travel has been recently mocked online, because that’s what the discourse is and does. Her point, to slightly reduce an already reductive point, is that people don’t change on travel because they just engage in “locomotion” and go from tourist site to tourist site, returning home unchanged and unenlightened. Callard writes that, on her first trip to Paris, she “walked from one end of the city to the other, over and over again, in a straight line; if you plotted my walks on a map, they would have formed a giant asterisk.” If you think I am about to join the mocking, you are mistaken. Join the questioning? Yes.