In between countries, and certainly above them all, perhaps even above the good and the mistaken, beyond the truthful and the confused. At least above the clouds and the dark skies of Europe in the autumn. Here there is blue sky and a white coat covering the land, so many thousands of meters under us. The distance tempts to a sense of clarity, the idea of not being attached to my daily limitations of intellect, or affection. Am I free-er if I flight? It does feels like.
There are cracks in the clouds under me, and I see stretches of land and lines of water, guessing which country or province might be the one that I am just flying above. But I am guessing with some detachment, with almost contempt for the people down there, toiling away in their lives.
They tell us that travel will improve our empathy with the others, those unknown people which we travel towards. But isn’t it that the tourist is always detached, passing by, registering moments for their photo albums, also promptly forgotten? It seems to me that the empathy generated by traveling is greatly exaggerated. If anything, to pass through a place make us more aware of how much we love our origin, and perhaps our destination. And just imagine if ou are traveling from the first world… which better way to find your privilege great, when compared with the great poverty outside the walls of forth Europe? On the contrary of the most normally assumed, traveling alienates us from the places we criss cross.
But then what? Is this really a plea for not to travel?
Suddenly the sea titillates under us. The clouds are gone. A long line of beach, the shores of Bordeaux. Once upon a time, buying wine somewhere down there, the seller told us the tale of his grandfather, an italian migrant that came to build dykes after the war, to protect the shore and the grapes, and stayed. His son married into a local family of wine makers, and so the young man talking to me, actually as removed from his original Italy as I am, two generations down the road. We started traveling and we wanted to come back, we hoped to be tourists, at most passing workers. But we stayed and become part of this continent, of any other.
I will have to smile to the next tourist I cross paths with. His kids might marry mine.