Having spent the last few years traveling internationally with student and alumni groups, I’ve developed a long list of rules. I call them the DS rules, and as of today there are 177 of them. I haven’t yet drawn them all up on a list, but I’m working on it. I’m beginning to think that I should compile all the DS rules and publish them in a “How to Travel” Manual. Rick Steves look out.
Some of the rules are pretty much common sense. Rule #3, for instance, is that students must show me their passports every time we leave one place to head for another. Most everyone no doubt would agree that it’s a good rule.
I’ll admit that a few are a tad more idiosyncratic. Rule #8 is that you should never buy anything while traveling that has either dimensions or volume. This is because what you buy, you have to pack.
Students find this rule puzzling. Everything, they remind me, has some volume, and under Rule #8 they can’t buy anything.
Exactly!
Now, I recognize that they have mothers and friends, and they want to bring home some special mementos of their time in Paris or what not, and so, like most of my rules, they treat this one more as a guideline. So I’ve decided to develop a ratio: the less volume you take on, the happier you will be and the better your experience.
Students don’t seem to like the ratio appendix to Rule #8 any more than they like Rule #8.
There’s a word for someone with 177 rules. They’re called curmudgeons. And curmudgeons usually have lots of pet peeves. This might surprise you, but I have lots of pet peeves. It’s always annoyed me, for instance, that ties cost as much as shirts. What’s up with that?
But let’s get back to travel. I now, officially, have a new #1 pet peeve: the digital camera. It is the worst invention of all time as far as travel is concerned.
The digital camera claims many virtues. Photos can be downloaded on your computer and easily sent to others. In electronic form they can be altered and improved, the amateur’s mistakes somewhat corrected. And they can store thousands on thousands of photos.
Here is the problem. Relatively speaking, in the pre-digital age, photos were scarcities. Tourists could only take as many photos as they had film. Whatever film they used had to be packed up and hauled home. (See DS rule #8.) Then they had to pay to have it developed. Hassle and expense meant that most people could afford to take only so many bad pictures.
Today, thanks to digital cameras, people can take as many bad pictures as they please. And they do. Now that every smart phone is also a camera, pretty much everyone takes as many bad photos as they can.
They take photos of everything, no matter how stupid or trivial, and as often as not they make a bad photo infinitely worse by including themselves in it. I’m told that these are called “selfies.” Hawkers at all the big tourist must-sees sell sticks with little plastic phone holders at the end that add a few feet of perspective. They’re called selfie-sticks. For a while there I thought the new tourist thing was to carry around a 9-iron, because that’s what they look like from a distance. I got to wondering why people thought they could pitch golf balls in Trafalgar Square.
Tourists preparing to hit golf balls in the Louvre Courtyard
Leaving aside that this practice shows that narcissism truly is a universal human condition, it might not be so big a deal that people seem to think they deserve to be in the same frame as, say, Caravaggio’s Christ at Emmaus.
The problem is that these big-shot selfie snappers now clog up entire museums. They walk into rooms, stop, and take pictures of the ceilings and walls. The three thousand or so people behind them trying to flow through a place like Versailles all have to stop too, and the three thousand people behind them, and the three thousand people behind them—well, you get the picture, so to speak.
Worse still, they stand in front of humanity’s greatest masterpieces and insult them by taking bad picture after bad picture of them, mostly with themselves included, and then move aside so the big-shot selfie snapper traveling with them can do the same. Then they each take a double selfie.
The other day I thought I’d found a small bit of serenity walking among the marble sculptures in the Louvre. Suddenly some mad man came running around snapping pictures of everything, completely indiscriminately, of light fixtures, of flooring tiles, of Aphrodite’s toenails. He looked like a little kid on his first Easter Egg hunt, who isn’t sure where he’s supposed to look but thinks he’s supposed to pick up everything in sight. He studied nothing. He took not a second to soak in the genius in the great work around him. But then he didn’t seem to know the difference between the art and the smoke detector.
No one actually looks at great art anymore. They just take pictures of it.
This isn’t just annoying, though it certainly is that. It indicates a profound disregard for the nature of art. The beauty and authenticity of great work reveal themselves only in the uniqueness, the singularity, of the work itself, as anyone who really has spent time standing in front of original work knows. The light, the texture, the detail, and what Walter Benjamin long ago called “the aura” of the real thing allow for an intimate conversation across time and space between the artist and the art lover. The conversation depends on having at least a few quiet minutes engaged with a piece, and this is getting harder and harder to enjoy against the selfie insanity.
Man taking a picture of air, Paris
So DS Rule #178: Ban the Camera!