TRAVELING IN STYLE : TIME & PLACE

EVERY PLACE HAS A HISTORY. SOMETHING HAPpened everywhere--if not to humankind directly, then to plants or animals or molecules and thus to humankind eventually. But certain places seem particularly saturated with historical import. In certain places, the past is palpable. Yesterday seems to have left without closing the door.

As travelers, we tend to love these places. We’re drawn to oozing history like bears to honey. We use jumbo jets and air-conditioned rental cars to seek out ancient footpaths, stone hewn by hand. We book ourselves electronically on treasure hunts for relics and reminders of the pre-mechanical, the all-but-lost. We want to be where it all happened. Why? What should it matter to us where a revolution was hatched, a saint interred, an expatriate writer tossed out of a bar? Is it morbid curiosity, like visiting the scene of an accident? (Say, are those bloodstains ?) Is it an effort to build visual images of something we’ve only heard about and don’t quite trust ourselves merely to imagine?

Or is it just that places, and the things that define them, seem charged, in an almost electrical sense, by the events they have witnessed? Are we just plugging in (however loosely) to where we came from (however distantly)? Sure we are. Every place has a history, and so does every one of us. And in the broadest, most human sense, it’s the same one.