| I hate travelling and explorers Amazonia， Tibet and Africa fill the bookshops in the form of travelogues， accounts of expeditionsand collections of photographs， in all of which the desire to impressis so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to assess thevalue of the evidence put before him. Instead of having his criticalfaculties stimulated， he asks for more such pabulum and swallowsprodigious quantities of it. Nowadays， being an explorer is a trade，which consists not， as one might think， in discovering hithertounknown facts after years of study， but in covering a great manymiles and assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures， preferably incolor， so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in succes-sion. For this audience， platitudes and commonplaces seem to havebeen miraculously transmuted into revelations by the sole fact thattheir author， instead of doing his plagiarizing at home， has suppos-edly sanctified it by covering some twenty thousand miles Jour-neys， those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises， will neveragain yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating andoverexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once andfor all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness ofhuman beings have bbeen corrupted by a busyness with dubiousimplications， which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquireonly contaminated memories So 1 can understand the mad pas-sion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusionof something which no longer exists but still should exist， if we wereto have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that thehistory of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable. --CLAUDE LI~vI-STRAt!SS， Tristes Tropiqt~ s (1955) AA ~~ |
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