(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, July 1954) Recently I drove from Garrison-on-Hudson to New York on a Sunday afternoon, one unit in a creeping parade of metal, miles and miles of shiny paint and chrome inching along bumper to bumper. There were no old rust heaps, no jalopies. Every so often we passed a car…

(Originally published in Holiday Magazine, May 1965) My widowed mother’s name is now “Memère”— nickname for Grandma in Québecois—since her grandson, my nephew, calls her that. It is 1957. I am still an itinerant; Memère and I are going from Florida to try to settle down in San Francisco, our meager belongings following us slowly…

1) On the essential hardship of travel in the ancient world As late as the end of the fourth century BC, travel in and around Greece was neither easy nor particularly pleasant. Those who went by sea depended on the sailings of merchant-men, put up with casual accommodations once abroad, and worried about pirate attacks…

From The Guardian, September 19, 2009 (an excerpt) Last year, on a visit to the Mani in the Peloponnese, I went to visit the headland where Bruce Chatwin had asked for his ashes to be scattered. The hillside chapel where Chatwin’s widow, Elizabeth, brought his urn lies in rocky fields near the village of Exchori,…

1) On the notions of “success” that bind us to big cities Success and failure were the terms in which young people who had just moved into the city spoke. It was not a place to live as much as it was a test or a game. I despise both. “Why don’t you leave?” I…

(an excerpt) Several weeks ago, as I was reflecting on what I might say at this occasion, I encountered a friendly colleague, whom I asked for ideas and suggestions. “What is the title of your lecture?” he asked. “Identity, Authority, and Freedom,” I replied. “Interesting,” he responded. “You mean, therefore, identity is the faculty, authority…

1) The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience The first grand discovery was time, the landscape of experience. Only by marking off months, weeks, and years, days and hours, minutes and seconds, would mankind be liberated from the cyclical monotony of nature. The flow of shadows, sand, water, and time itself, translated…

1) On the tendency of early anthropologists to see tourists as intruders So long as the idea of culture remained bound in place and time and the interest of anthropologists was focused on the discrete nature of particular “cultures,” phenomena such as tourism could rarely be viewed as more than an unwelcome intrusion upon the…

1) On the origins of campus “political correctness” discourse Throughout the 1980s, conservative pundits warned of a multiculturalist crusade to reshape the campus. …Speech codes and sexual-harassment policies targeted those who did not display the proper sensitivities to minorities and women. The professors of the academic left underwrote these developments by unmasking the ideal of…

1) On the sheer economic power of tourism In gross economic power [tourism] is in the same company as oil, energy, finance and agriculture. At least one out of every ten people around the world is financed by the industry, according to Wolfgang Weinz of the International Labour Organization, who told me that the figure…