Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of scenery [Animum debes mutare, non caelum].--Seneca, Letters, 28.
Seneca is surely right that travel generally reinforces and even reveals existing tensions. I am confident there is a statistic somewhere that, on average, parents get into more squabbles shortly before they leave on family holiday, or during that holiday, than at other times (and not just correlated to casino-resort-induced-bankruptcy). More subtly, one need not be an elitist, to see that much tourism is a kind of temporary escapism that fails to address structural features that condition one's well-being. If the previous sentence strikes you as ridiculously highfalutin, I remind you of the return trip from Corfu on Ryan Air, when you are hung-over and a three year old is whining in a high pitch five rows ahead of you (and you suddenly recognize that's your child). To paraphrase Seneca, you fly along with yourself, and your relations.
For most of my post-PhD professional life, the Summer between academic years was when I got research & writing done. This led to inevitable work-balance dilemmas (yes, those are weasel words) during family trips. Rather than enjoying each other's company, my desire to get back to work, meet a deadline, finish a revision (etc.) only led to irritation and/or (barely suppressed) conflict. The low point was probably my honeymoon -- I am not making this up -- where we not only brought our lovely son, but also the submission deadline of a pan-European grant proposal (of which I was PI), which required coordination between seven, slow-moving and fickle university bureaucracies (including at least one that had major corruption problems). Of course, we didn't get the grant (despite happy referees) due to structurally low acceptance rates.
But not bringing my laptop and not answering work-related emails (on my smart-phone) has improved my holiday experience and made me, I hope, more pleasant to be with during the holiday (compared to being with me on holiday previously). Of course, this does not address Seneca's point because for all I know I may be the same miserable human when I return from holiday. Not to mention the fact that upon return, I have a load of automatically generated emails reminding me of missed referee-request deadlines--I can't tell you how much I curse the influence of Nudge.
But lurking in Seneca's letter is a more important point. The very idea of holiday travel, presupposes that home is one place (or, if you are insanely wealthy senator, many places) and that one is a tourist/guest/visitor/refugee/stranger in the other places. This is clear from his admonition to live one's life with the conviction that one's home-territory (or patrimony) is not a mere corner, one's birthplace, but the whole world [Cum hac persuasione vivendum est: 'non sum uni angulo natus, patria mea totus hic mundus est'].
Now, it is of course a familiar fact that Seneca is a cosmopolitan and that being a citizen of an expansive empire makes it easier to think of oneself as a citizen of the world. But, without denying the moral and political ways in which Seneca may also be such a cosmopolitan, the primary point here is the task to be at ease, as it were, with one's authentic self anywhere and nowhere. And this self is inauthentic both when it seeks novelty as a species of distraction elsewhere [this is the main example used by Seneca in this letter] as well as when it brings the comforts and trappings of one's home -- say, Dutch peanut-butter to French campgrounds -- to foreign places [these signify the fleeting attachments that make us servile and miserable (recall, for example, Letter 19). And the very act of tourism is a recognition of a transient way of being.
Luckily I am not, myself, much attached to holidays that promise spiritual renewal.
But my smugness disappears when I read Seneca's closing quote from Epicurus: one's health begins with the marking of one's waywardness or deviations from the true path. [Initium est salutis notitia peccati.]* To secure the first steps on our path of self-improvement, we must engage in honest self-scrutiny; we must, anticipating Adam Smith, split ourselves into different persons and become, as it were, prosecutors/judges (etc.) of ourselves. And such self-scrutiny is impossible if one is, as it were, in motion such that a selfie becomes a blur.
To be sure, there is a improper way in all of this not just because of the strength of self-deception; Seneca warns against what he calls the glorification of vice [vitiis gloriantur]. I am, here, reminded of one of my favorite, Jewish jokes (thank you mom!):
During Yom Kippur services the Rabbi kneels and puts his forehead to the floor and says,
"Before you oh Lord, I am nothing."
The Cantor looks at him, kneels, puts his forehead to the floor, and says, "Before you oh Lord, I am nothing." Further back, a schlemiel is watching, goes in the middle of the isle, kneels and puts his forehead to the floor and wails,
"Before you oh Lord, I am nothing."
The Rabbi nudges the Cantor. "Look who thinks he's nothing!"
Maybe, next holiday, I'll try to stay away from Facebook.
*Google wants me to translate peccati with sins. But that's not just too Christian for my taste; it also does not capture the ways [sic] in which peccati is rooted in pes (foot/path, etc.)
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