We no longer travel, at least if we accept Paul Fussell's definition of the term. And it is true that when we leave our homes these days and travel to places far away from our own home we do not do so in the same ways that the travelers in Fussell's Abroad traveled. In the years between the wars, when life seemed suddenly both precious and revitalized, people spread across the globe in an attempt to find new meaning for their life. Travel, or so Fussell argues, was for these people in a time before the shadows of postmodern life, an epiphany, a rebirth, one of the most important things that an individual could do. Fussell suggests that - with fast jets and travelers' checks - travel can no longer offer such possibilities for renewal and rediscovery. We are tourists now, no longer true travels.
The kind of travel that Fussell celebrates is immortalized by writers like Orwell, Twain, and Swift, each of whom created narratives of their experiences abroad that were partly factual, partly visionary and that were always replete with the details of the experience. The overwhelming impression that we have as readers when we experience a work like Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier is the richness of the sensory experience. Fussell argues that to the real traveler (as opposed to the mere tourists that we have become) travel makes one supremely aware of the way in which the world looks, of new sights and sounds and tastes and smells. Travel is essentially sensory, Fussell argues (p. 41), and clearly his model of travel as sensory-expansion.
Travel is also for writers such as Orwell and Twain a form of mental cleansing: It allowed them to replace their impressions of a world made mean and even disgusting through the processes of modernization with the simpler and more brilliant realities "out there" - in the kinds of places that people from the modern and industrialized world would want to go. Here, for example, is Orwell's description from th...