Sight-skipping

Sometime in May 2008, I was sitting on a train crossing Central Java, en route from Bandung to Surabaya. Almost exactly halfway through the journey, the train pulled in to the station at Yokyakarta, a small city famous for being the gateway to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist archaeological site in the world. Once it had stopped, the train disgorged a handful of passengers, took a few more on, and resumed its course eastward. 

I stayed in my seat, watched Yogya recede from view as the train got up to speed, and skipped what is probably the biggest man-made sight in Southeast Asia after Angkor Wat. I didn’t regret the decision then, and I don’t regret the decision now, five years later. I had been on the road for three months. I was weary of sightseeing. I just wanted to move.

The handful of big sights I’ve seen in my life (the man-made ones, that is), have been an incredible bore and disappointment to me. Not because they were smaller, uglier, or more defiled than I had imagined, but simply because nothing at all happened when I saw them. One day in Sydney, for example, I walked past the Opera House and over the Harbour Bridge. That’s it. There’s no story to the experience, just as there never is in  sightseeing. The grand sights of Sydney were boring, as was the Grand Palace of Bangkok, the Empire State Building, all of Washington, D.C.

The most interesting and memorable part of Sydney, in fact, was my nearly unhinged middle-aged roommate who got drunk on boxed wine almost every night and told me about the plans he and his girlfriend had to resurrect dinosaurs from the rich jungle soil of Vanuatu. In retrospect, the time I spent seeing the sights—and not chatting with this loony character—seems like a waste. 

Paul Theroux wrote that sightseeing “has all the boredom and ritual of a pilgrimage and none of the spiritual benefits.” I have to agree. The few times I’ve gone out sightseeing, it has always been with a sense of duty. Up until the day before I passed through Yogyakarta, I had intended to do what I was supposed to—go see Borobudur, snap a picture, be able to say I had seen it. But my road-weariness made me realize I was simply following what other people thought I should care about, not what I actually did care about. So I passed it up.

Was my travel experience necessarily richer for having skipped this major attraction? Hard to know. But I do know that the best memories from that trip involve people rather than sights, and if the choice were between either seeing the wonders of the world or skipping them and having more days like the one I had in Medan—where two college guys befriended me, taught me how to ride a motorbike, and introduced me to goat meat and durian—I’d take the latter in a heartbeat.

Now that I’m going to be doing some traveling again, I’ll probably be skipping a lot more sights. What I hope is that, in skipping them, I can maximize the experiences that make travel truly rewarding—namely, human connection, and honest observation of what makes a place tick. It’s not always easy. Travel can be lonely, and the days can be long. Sightseeing is often a way to fill a void of time. But I’m convinced that simply existing in a place, maintaining a slow pace and an open mind, is a more likely route to travel fulfillment than dutifully trekking from one sight to the next.

After all, the people living in a place rarely go out of their way to gawk at the local monuments and grand buildings. What New Yorker cares about the Statue of Liberty? Life happens elsewhere, and the life is what I’m most interested in when I visit a place. To see it, absorb it, and be richer for it.

Postscript

None of the above applies to the genuine grandeur and awe of the natural world. The sight of Mount Rainier trumps any other experience I know of.

The end of reader's vanity

I ordered a Kindle the other day, something I long thought I would never do. I’ve held out against e-reading for steadfastly aesthetic and sentimental reasons: I like the weight of books, their smell, the sound of pages turning. I like looking at covers and dust jackets, and I like using a Post-it as a bookmark so I can jot down words, places, and names I want to look up later. 

What made me abandon my hang-ups about e-readers is that I’m heading overseas soon, and for a long time. My reading interests tend toward the specific, and I couldn’t bear the thought of spending a year or longer reading nothing but bestselling paperbacks passed on from traveler to traveler. (One time while traveling I read the traumatically bad Angels and Demons, simply because there was nothing else available.) A “device,” as everyone enjoys calling them, seemed the only answer.

I’m sure I’ll be pleased with the purchase. Once I’m in those faraway lands where English-language books are scarce, the intellectual pleasure I get from reading exactly what I want will easily trump the aesthetic displeasure I get from holding an electronic gadget instead of a paper-and-ink book.

But as I sat on the couch last night reading one of those paper-and-inkers, I realized that by moving to e-readers we’re losing something more than just aesthetics. We’re losing reader’s vanity.

Even though reading itself is a private activity, books clearly have a social dimension to them. We carry books around with us, we read them in public, and other people—friends, roommates, strangers at the coffee shop—often see them. I doubt there are many bookish people who haven’t secretly hoped someone would notice what they were reading and admire them for it, maybe even fall in love with them for it.

Reader’s vanity like that has been with me my entire reading life. I like hearing people comment on what I’m reading. I like the idea that my reading reflects well on me. I haven’t ever read anything purely for vanity’s sake—slogging through something I hated just because it looked smart—or ostentatiously called attention to a book I was holding, but I’ve always gotten a thrill from the way a book subtly advertises my intellectual life. 

Of course, that advertisement no longer exists with a Kindle. As e-books continue to supplant print, the population of readers will become an undifferentiated mob of tablet-holders. Their reading choices will be no one’s business but their own. No one will be able to tell if you’re reading an e-book with a file size of two megabytes or ten. Nor will they be able to tell whether it’s a trashy murder mystery, or a serious historical treatise, or even a damned magazine.

Also, to look at things from the other side of the glass, the proliferation of e-readers is going to make it impossible, as a people-watcher, to judge others by what they’re reading. Who hasn’t taken a greater or lesser interest in a stranger based on what book they had in front of them? Reading choices can be a window into someone’s soul. A Kindle shuts the blinds.

It’s not unreasonable to suppose that e-books will completely (or very nearly completely) take over print within our lifetimes. It’s a strange vision of the future: libraries and bookstores moved entirely online, everyone staring at identical black or slate-gray tablets. I imagine it will be harder to make an intellectual map of one’s environment. Books are part of the color and life of our world, and in their absence we’ll probably lose a shade of understanding of those around us.

But if there’s one lesson to be drawn from technological development in the past ten years, it’s that where there’s a desire, it will be met. If readers feel they’ve lost something by migrating to e-books, someone will find a way to give it back to them. Most likely, as books and libraries move online, so too will readers’ vanities and judgments.

I noticed on my roommate’s Kindle, for example, that there’s a “share” feature: Let your friends know what you’re reading, in real time! You can highlight text and press a button to broadcast it to the world, presumably through Facebook, Twitter, or some other social time-wasting site. 

At the moment this kind of sharing seems a bit too vain, even for me. I want people to notice what I’m reading, I don’t want to shout it at them. But in time the crafty souls at Amazon and elsewhere may find more subtle ways for us to regain our reader’s vanity. Perhaps a small screen on the opposite side of the tablet that displays the cover of the book you’re reading. Or an app that detects other e-readers within a fifty-foot radius and tells you what’s on them. 

Maybe these things are already in development. But until the purveyors of e-readers give me a dignified way to display my reading choices, I’ll just have to learn to be a bit less vain, and a bit less judgmental. Both of those would be healthy changes for me. But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.