A History of the Roamin’ Empire : THE MIND OF THE TRAVELER: From Gilgamesh to Modern Tourism <i> By Eric J. Leed (Basic Books: $24.95; 315 pp., illustrated)</i>

When I began reading this book, I was stuck on an airplane the day after a tragic crash, facing an unspecified delay and trying hard not to face the charred wreckage on the adjoining runway. My pathetic efforts to dispel the fear of death by calculating triple mileage made the vast psychic difference between the heroic traveler of the past and the modern tourist palpable to me, as I shifted uneasily between the mind sets of risk and routine. “The Mind of the Traveler” charts the history of this transformation as a cultural phenomenon.

We live in a society of travelers, where relatively few people eat, sleep and work in the same place. Mobility is normal; more than that, it’s the tie that binds our segmented lives in the modern metropolises--those urban corridors that differ so strikingly from ancient walled cities. Though most inhabitants of the polis and the medieval fortress rarely ventured out of them, in the beginning we were a migratory species--at least since the expulsion from Eden.

Intellectual historian Eric J. Leed has written a complex and fascinating exploration of history from the perspective of mobility, drawing on the vast and various literature of travel. He argues that travel is “a central rather than a peripheral force in historical transformation,” that the “creation of locale, the mapping of territory, the territorializations of humanity are achievements of mobility. . . . Boundaries are made by those who cross them.”

This is not the customary explanatory model, which assumes that “societies are boundaried, centered, contained and enduring structures.” In Leed’s view, walls presuppose strangers; their stones are materializations of the flow of humanity. The great ancient centers--Delos, Memphis, Jerusalem, Mecca--are “only monuments to generations of arrivals and returns, the skeletal remains of countless journeys.”

If traditional history is “Hamlet,” Leed gives us Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. For him, travel creates the human condition. Mobility shapes history, operating through the events that structure the journey: departures, passages and arrivals--the sequential experience whose cumulative effects alter travelers and change culture.

“Passage produces the comparativist and the relativist,” Leed writes. It establishes distance between the self and the alien other. Travelers perceive commonalities as well, from which derives the idea of humanity itself, “an idea that emerged during the great age of European travel and discovery.”

Before the voyages to the New World, Europeans saw their culture as inferior, what remained of the glories of classical antiquity, much as today’s youth regard themselves vis-a-vis the ‘60s--remote from the Golden Age. After their encounters with the native peoples of the New World, whom they perceived as primitive, Europeans developed a new consciousness of themselves as an advanced and advancing culture. This Eurocentric attitude made it morally acceptable, even imperative, for them to impose their hegemony everywhere. This is one of many examples of how the mind of the traveler effects cultural change.

Leed traces the transformations wrought by the great travel traditions of the West--heroic travels, pilgrimages, military expeditions, and especially philosophical travel in search of social or scientific knowledge. The backbone of the book is “the transition from the ancient emphasis upon travel as necessary suffering to the modern emphasis upon travel as an experience of freedom and the gaining of autonomy.”

In the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the first work of Western travel literature, departure is painful. Etymologically and anciently, travel is travail, an ordeal ordained by the gods to test the hero, improve him and make him famous. It is a gendering activity, “a source of behaviors and representations definitive of masculinity in many cultures and periods.”

Except in nomadic groups, woman is rooted, the symbol of hearth and home, whether as Penelope or as a prostitute. She mediates arrivals, “inducts strangers into the relationships of kinship and food-giving.”

These features of travel are not unfamiliar, but our current concept is radically different. It’s not just that women can do it. Now travel often is a pleasure we seek, a demonstration of our liberty rather than a fate we endure. And its significance has changed. “The age of global tourism seems to have foreclosed those forms of immortality and sources of meaning found in travel from the time of Gilgamesh. . . . Travel has been the medium of traditional male immortalities.” No more. Travel is normal.

Without even counting commuters and military personnel, immigrants and exiles, tourism today is the second largest retail industry in the United States. By the year 2000, it is expected to be the world’s largest industry.

With travel commonplace, adventure and escape become impossible, an irony noted by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss: “I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist.”

Now tourists are entreated to enter the once Forbidden City, and climb the Himalayas to lose weight. Journeys with customized hardships are readily available. A hotel in the Ecuadorean Amazon promises to provide anything from a guided stroll to a strenuous hike “which will make you feel like the real Indiana Jones.”

Unless, as is likely, the woods are full of other cavorting Indianas, forcing you to keep up with the Joneses you were trying to elude. The tourist is like “a prisoner pacing a cell much crossed and grooved by other equally mobile and ‘free’ captives.” Modernity is inescapable. So are we moderns.

Nevertheless, the universal aim of the tourist is to avoid other tourists, clear evidence of the fact that travel no longer is a means of achieving distinction. Rather, it is “a way of achieving and realizing a norm, the common identity we all share--the identity of the stranger.”

“The Mind of the Traveler” is very demanding to read, although lucidly written and structured. Packed with ideas and insights, it draws on wonderful esoterica like the saga of Olaf the Peacock and a study of the South Kiwa Pig-kill. But even relatively familiar material is explained in a novel context. The book offers a fresh, intriguing and suggestive take on the gestalt of history. In other words, it’s a trip.