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The Unfree Tourist: Visiting Paris, But Not the Louvre
A Personal Perspective: Why do tourists visit particular landmarks?
Updated September 25, 2023 Reviewed by Ray Parker
There is an episode of the radio show This American Life in which author and comedian David Sedaris talks about how he lived in Paris for two years without ever setting foot in the Louvre, or visiting the Eiffel Tower, or the Rodin Museum, or any of the other places tourists flock. He wasn’t trying to be contrarian for the sake of it, he says: the main attractions that the city of Paris is known for simply did not interest him.
There is something liberating about Sedaris’s way of looking at this. But what exactly is it he’d liberated himself from? And was he making an error?
Travel can often seem like an assignment: there is a list of things one is supposed to do and see in Paris, or Athens, or Shanghai, and many tourists (dutifully) make their way down the checklist, often taking pictures of themselves at landmarks and posting those on social media. Yet, proceeding this way can be quite reasonable. I wish to explain why before I turn to counterarguments.
Trusting Others
First, it is often a good heuristic, in general, to rely on other people’s testimony about what’s interesting and important to see, especially if you have very little time, which is the case for most tourists. If you were dropped into Uttar Pradesh in India for one day, and you have no idea that the Taj Mahal is there, you might really miss something worth seeing. Some places that attract a lot of visitors do so for a good reason.
In addition, landmarks provide common reference points. If there is a large overlap in the places we visit, we can compare our reactions to those of other people. That way, we can discover our own tastes and temperaments. If we both see the Eiffel Tower, and one of us, like author Guy de Maupassant according to reports, strongly dislikes it, while others find it visually appealing, this would be interesting.
We can each try to see the object with the other’s eyes and understand why the other reacts differently. It is only possible to do this if we look at the same object. Two different reactions on the part of two people to two dissimilar stimuli cannot be usefully compared.
Often, however, as tourists, we do not simply take other people’s testimony into account in deciding what to do, but feel constrained by it and in two ways: first, we think there are certain landmarks we have to visit; second and more surprisingly, we believe we are supposed to have particular reactions, such as admiration or awe. It is as though we read positive reviews of a product on the internet and thought we had a duty to buy the product and like it too.
That we have this sense is curious and worth thinking about. What is the explanation? Is it conformism? Lack of self-trust? Not knowing ourselves well enough to know what we’d prefer?
Your Vacation, Your Rules
Whatever the answer, the sense is illusory. We are, after all, on vacation: our vacation. A tourist is not a person on an assignment. And it’s no one’s business how we spend our time either.
No less importantly, we don’t have to like anything we see, no matter how many people before us reported that they did. That’s just not how liking works. And trying to persuade ourselves that we are enjoying something we are not is usually a bad idea, in traveling and elsewhere.
I must open a bracket here in order to mention that things are somewhat more complicated if one is traveling with minor children. When I was in middle school, we had a trip for a week in May. They’d put all of us kids on a bus, and we’d travel from place to place for several days.
In general, when we went to a new town or city, the teachers made sure to take us to whatever they thought we were supposed to see. Then one time, a cool young teacher asked us whether we wouldn’t prefer, instead, to just walk around and explore the pretty town where we were for ourselves. We did that and loved it. In retrospect, however, while I think it was a great idea for that teacher to let us see a new place without following a plan that one afternoon, I think it would have been ill-advised for all the teachers to do that every day on all the trips.
Similarly, I am not sure a parent going to Paris with children would be well-advised to take the David Sedaris way, even if that’s what the parent would prefer. But we can set this issue aside since traveling with minors may, in fact, have something of an assignment aspect to it. Not so when we travel without people whose education we are responsible for.
Our tendency to feel as though we have to visit this or that landmark (and be impressed by it) is likely an aspect of a more general tendency to feel pressured to do things as others do them. In some cases, there is good a reason for this, but in others, there isn’t.
For instance, my spouse and I had a wedding for two. We booked a hotel room at a beautiful place in the mountains, went up there with our marriage license, spent a day enjoying the venue and each other’s company, signed our license, and got back. Our wedding was perfect for us.
Other people greatly enjoy bigger ones, and some like to have a very big one, possibly in an exotic location. That can be wonderful as well, but only if that’s what the people getting married want. Many seem to think they have to invite a large group of guests, including people they haven’t even seen in years. (One of the best parts of a two-person wedding, by the way, is that no one feels slighted on account of not being invited. No one thinks they are so important to a couple getting married, they ought to have been the one and only guest.)
In the subsequent years, several people, upon finding out my spouse and I had a wedding for two, had the reaction, “You can do that?” You can, indeed. A big wedding is not the sort of thing one should organize out of duty as though one owes it to third parties.
As with weddings, so with vacation travel. It is perfectly fine to go to Paris and never set foot in the Louvre or the Rodin Museum, or the Notre Dame Cathedral. You can spend your time walking along the river, with occasional breaks for coffee and a peach tarte. You can stay in your hotel room and journal for two days, if that's what you want to do. It is fine to go to the Vatican and not see the Pope.
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