On Being a Traveler

As I have been visiting some of the most splendid monuments of glorious civilizations, I have also been struggling to find the proper state of mind. I am sensitive enough to realize that the places I am seeing are more than just good locations to have my picture taken, but at the same time I feel that there is a great significance that I am not fully able to appreciate. Many of the travelers I see spend a good deal of time with their faces shoved in their guide books as they try to decipher what they are seeing. In a way that seems like the proper effort, but in doing so I think that they miss the splendor at the price of a morsel of understanding. It is somewhat like going to a liturgy and spending the whole service plastered to the service book without taking the time to absorb the images or meditate on the music.
I think part of the difficulty has to do with being a traveler as opposed to being a tourist or a pilgrim. A tourist travels in large groups and sees a good many things without really having the time to pay attention to any of it. They glide along from one site to another in their air-conditioned buses during the day and spend the night in expensive hotels and restaurants. They don’t interact with the locals much but they do spend a lot of money. This group, however, does not need to interact with the history or the locals, for they are there on a vacation, and the number one imperative for them is to see a number of splendors and to relax. They have a hassle free good time appropriate to their intentions and they sink a substantial sum of money into the economy.
The pilgrim, on the other hand, goes to a specific place for a specific purpose and attaches a great significance to that place. They expect that there is something magical or miraculous about it and that this magic will somehow impart itself onto them. They are ardent believers in supernatural forces and go to places where they believe those forces are particularly strong. However, I believe that the pilgrim is almost non-existent in the modern world, for even the most sincere believers of a particular faith no longer really prescribe to the notion of magical places or healing waters per say, at least in Christianity, for pilgrimages are an important part of Islam as they once were for Christianity.
The traveler is somewhere in between the two, although there are many different types of travelers as well. For the most part they don’t have a great deal of money. They often try to get employment in the countries that they are seeing, but this is by no means a rule. They are usually searching for something authentic without the trapping of superstition that the former are frequently accused of. They want to get to know the people, although this can sometimes be another trapping into a false sense of sincerity. It is impossible to really get to know a people unless you both suffer and celebrate with them, and it is hard to do this unless you are quite intimate with them. This means that you have to be willing to give up some of the privilege that you come with and to really humble yourself. I have seen few that have been able to actually do this, for it takes a great deal of time. I have met people who have been living in Istanbul for a number of years who still rarely interact with the inhabitants aside from their professional activity.
These things being said, for the traveler, as I identify myself, seeing sites can be a interesting problem for those who are sensitive. Seeing the places as neither truly sacred nor profane, we are in an ambiguous position. As such I have heard a lot of travelers speak of the sites as they would a movie (tourists on the other hand find everything absolutely wonderful unless the toilets weren’t clean or the walk was too steep). Because the sites are there to be passively observed there is no real way for the visitor to interact or engage with what they are seeing. The only recourse that we have is our imagination, which cannot properly function if it is too crowded or if we are not sufficiently educated on the place (and the cheap tourist books are not an education).
Of course there is the sheer aesthetic wonder of these places, but that too is somewhat abstract. Buildings can only ever be half beautiful apart from the context that they were built in. For example one can go to the most splendid churches, but the splendor of the church is only half of the whole, for the building was built to have music played, prayers chanted, people gathered. So just seeing the building one only gets a real fraction of the complete process. The problem with traveling is that we can get a false sense that in seeing this fraction, which is all that is left, that we understand the whole. For myself, the problem is that in only seeing a fraction I become painfully aware that there is so much that I am missing and can never have access to. I am not walking the crowded streets of Ephesus during the height of its glory, filled with massive statues and temples to the point of absurdity, I only see where these things would have been. Nor am I able to attend the Liturgy in Hagia Sophia as such a time when visitors reported that they believed that they were actually in heaven. I suppose, though, that this is a perennial problem of history, for so much requires an active imagination to fill the spaces between the corporeal materials that our ancestors have left for us to ponder.
I suppose my resolve to this conundrum, if a resolve is possible or necessary, is to see the sights as they are: magnificent piles of rocks, or glorious monuments to God and human ingenuity. Seeing these things can help me with my historical understanding, for a lot can be learned from the geography, the climate and so on. These climates demand certain habits no matter if one is a Turk, a Greek, a Roman, a Persian. That being said perhaps I should just do what the locals do and spend the rest of my time at the beach.