Electric Literature published an excerpt of Mary Mann’s new book, Yawn: Adventures in Boredom. In this chapter about the origins, tensions, and limitations of tourism, she lays bare what most travelers are loathe to admit: it’s just as easy to be bored in Paris or on Bora Bora as it is at home.
What would I do if I had nowhere to be? Because I’ve been fortunate enough to travel aimlessly for a couple of months, I can tell you: I’d be irritable. Free time is daunting. The world has been shaped by our inability to deal with free time. Cook intended for tourism to pull us out of the mundane ordinary, and people who can’t travel (like Jamaica Kincaid’s tourist-hating locals) desire to do so for that reason. We travel to escape a losing battle with time — the autoworker Ben Hampers “war with that suffocating minute hand” — but we still have to deal with time, by napping it away or filling it with sightseeing or traveling to the brighter past that travel ads promise. For the majority of us, free time has proved too unwieldy to manage without habits, and, from Ruskin’s “white leprosy” of hotels to the Banana Pancake Trail, the habits of travelers have reshaped the world.
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