Photo © David Walter Banks Tom Lutz is Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. His previous books include Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums and Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears.

This book is an essay towards understanding my obsession with travel. Made up of the same elements that fuel any tourism-simple curiosity, a yearning for adventure and exoticism, the quest for enlightenment, scopophilia (a love of seeing—my namesake, Doubting Thomas, needed to see the wounds), wanderlust, a yearning for wonder-it is, I sometimes think, not odd at all. The desire to see everything, to know one's own world—isn't this not only perfectly reasonable, but also almost our human responsibility? Someone went to a lot of trouble to lay the world out in front of us, to build all these cultures, to create astonishments like Angkor Wat, Macchu Pichu, or the Forbidden City, to stick those heads on Easter Island, and to throw the cathedral at Chartres, as Henry Adams says, at the sky. It seems ungrateful not to take a look.

Many of us also travel because we want to feel worldly, cosmopolitan, to know the world the way the worldly people know it, to not feel left out when someone mentions Paris or London or Rome (or Angkor Wat, Macchu Pichu, or the Forbidden City). Something like this eggs me along, too. It's less attractive as a motive, I know, and makes me feel like a social climber, a kind of status whore. But let me just say it: I wanted to know the world as the well-travelled know it. I wanted to be like Graham Greene or Marco Polo, T.E. Lawrence, Amelia Earhart, or a foreign minister-or maybe a shadow foreign minister. Imitative, I suppose, and reeking of the snob, of one-upsmanship, and childish pretense: Harriett the Spy wandering the globe pretending to be Hillary Clinton.

Marx famously said that the need for new markets 'chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe', and in the process us bourgeois folks transform the world in our own image. Even in 1848, Marx saw the world's local cultures being swamped by the tide of cosmopolitan uniformity, the very sense of loss Levi Strauss shares a hundred years later. Fifteen years or so ago, a sailor in Greece told me that he loved his long-distance work in the merchant marine, and one of his favorite things, whenever he approached landfall, was to tune into the port city's radio and hear the local music. But part of the thrill was gone. Now, he said, wherever you go-Africa, Asia, South America-'always the same: Michael Jackson'.

But he and I, of course, help spread that global culture, and perhaps the very desire to be worldly. To go to the ends of the earth and revel in its difference helps destroy that difference, helps flatten the earth, and extinguish the exotic. The bourgeois traveller literally consumes the world's diversity.

Photo © David Walter Banks Tom Lutz is Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. His previous books include Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums and Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears.

This book is an essay towards understanding my obsession with travel. Made up of the same elements that fuel any tourism-simple curiosity, a yearning for adventure and exoticism, the quest for enlightenment, scopophilia (a love of seeing—my namesake, Doubting Thomas, needed to see the wounds), wanderlust, a yearning for wonder-it is, I sometimes think, not odd at all. The desire to see everything, to know one's own world—isn't this not only perfectly reasonable, but also almost our human responsibility? Someone went to a lot of trouble to lay the world out in front of us, to build all these cultures, to create astonishments like Angkor Wat, Macchu Pichu, or the Forbidden City, to stick those heads on Easter Island, and to throw the cathedral at Chartres, as Henry Adams says, at the sky. It seems ungrateful not to take a look.

Many of us also travel because we want to feel worldly, cosmopolitan, to know the world the way the worldly people know it, to not feel left out when someone mentions Paris or London or Rome (or Angkor Wat, Macchu Pichu, or the Forbidden City). Something like this eggs me along, too. It's less attractive as a motive, I know, and makes me feel like a social climber, a kind of status whore. But let me just say it: I wanted to know the world as the well-travelled know it. I wanted to be like Graham Greene or Marco Polo, T.E. Lawrence, Amelia Earhart, or a foreign minister-or maybe a shadow foreign minister. Imitative, I suppose, and reeking of the snob, of one-upsmanship, and childish pretense: Harriett the Spy wandering the globe pretending to be Hillary Clinton.

Marx famously said that the need for new markets 'chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe', and in the process us bourgeois folks transform the world in our own image. Even in 1848, Marx saw the world's local cultures being swamped by the tide of cosmopolitan uniformity, the very sense of loss Levi Strauss shares a hundred years later. Fifteen years or so ago, a sailor in Greece told me that he loved his long-distance work in the merchant marine, and one of his favorite things, whenever he approached landfall, was to tune into the port city's radio and hear the local music. But part of the thrill was gone. Now, he said, wherever you go-Africa, Asia, South America-'always the same: Michael Jackson'.

But he and I, of course, help spread that global culture, and perhaps the very desire to be worldly. To go to the ends of the earth and revel in its difference helps destroy that difference, helps flatten the earth, and extinguish the exotic. The bourgeois traveller literally consumes the world's diversity.