What I Saw in America

MP3 Audio CD. What I Saw in America


I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the
mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and
imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there
is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the
thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders,
embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead
or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what
they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant
for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond
that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather
an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be
inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw
dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the
abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as
those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the
fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar
manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in
fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if
men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand
each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger--the moment
when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a
meeting meant a duel.

Travel ought to combine amusement with instruction; but most travellers
are so much amused that they refuse to be instructed. I do not blame
them for being amused; it is perfectly natural to be amused at a
Dutchman for being Dutch or a Chinaman for being Chinese. Where they are
wrong is that they take thei