Orts #992
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
— attributed to Plato
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- a flamboyance of flamingos -
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/05/photos-a-flamboyance-of-flamingos/611848/
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[According to the United States Department of Agriculture's Census of Agriculture Historical Archive, there are fewer American farmers today than there were during the Civil War, despite America’s population being nearly 11 times greater.
-- quoted in The End of Meat is Here, Jonathan Safran Foer, NYT May 21, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/coronavirus-meat-vegetarianism.html
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As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it's only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let's-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place and context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way--hostile to my fantasy of being a real individual, . . . . To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathesome, an insect on a dead thing.
-- part of a footnote in a splendid essay by David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster, in Gourmet magazine, August 2004
http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobster.html