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I’m on a train passing between Lake Como and Milan; I’ve been traveling for a week now, though it feels like more. It’s been ten years since I spent significant time in Italy (I was a young man and more naive than I could have naively imagined I was)The present trip constitutes what’s ordinarily called a vacation. In a moral sense, I’m slightly against vacations — which connote with consumption frenzies — so I might say, rather, that I’ve gone to Europe to — in the most pleasant, bourgeoisie fashion imaginable — break with my New York/American mindset and routines.
This Medium post represents maybe 2% of the writing I’ve done here, entirely by hand, without any intention to publish. I’m only posting now because I feel process of fructification is basically complete: I feel different enough now from the person who stepped on to an airplane last week to share some of my reflections publicly.
Or perhaps I just feel like writing; perhaps I’ve written myself into a state where writing flows easily again. I think that’s it.
I don’t glorify travel, don’t think we ought do it for its own sake. It’s very easy to simply go and consume a different country in the same way that you consume your own. Instagram vacation optics belie the sweaty, uncomfortable, sometimes poisonous reality of summer European travel. It takes no great insight to point out that Americanism has crept into every Italian city center, restaurant, cafe; monumental world-historical works of art are gawked at by visually stupid and stupefied tourists who have no wish other…
