Do It When You Can

Venice, they say, is the city that you must visit at least once before you die.

Sure, I would like to visit the Italian city but it is just one of many cities and places that I would like to visit. Sadly, though, I realize it’s more than likely that I will die before I have a chance to do so. Time is running out on me fast.

Like so many others, I wanted to visit those famous places when I was young. But it was the period in my life when I was too poor or too busy trying to make a living to do so. Since I retired, I have time enough and a bit of money, but, ironically, I have reached the stage in life when traveling is simply too strenuous to enjoy.

There is a saying in my native Korea: “Play, play when you are young. For, you cannot when you are old.” How true!

But when you are young, as I said, there are a lot of other pressing things for you to do (which is generally known as “the rat race”), so that traveling for pleasure or enlightenment has to take a backseat, in a manner of speaking.

Last year, my wife and I went on a cruise on the Baltic Sea. No, it wasn’t a fancy or luxurious cruise, I thought, but since it was my first and only experience, I have no way of comparing it with others. But it was a good way of travelling and sightseeing for old folks, my wife agreed, because it wasn’t physically demanding as we moved from one country to another by ship. But it was a far cry from my youthful days when the ideal trip was to visit places alone or with friends who shared similar interests.

I used to despise group tours when I was young. I thought it was foolish for tourists to follow a guide, like a flock of sheep, from one place to another in accordance with the schedule set by the tour company. They passively listen to what the guide tells them and exclaim “ah” and “oh” as they look at the things the guide points out to them.

Herded by their guide, they breeze through museums, barely managing to have time to click their cameras at “famous” paintings or sculptures, before moving hurriedly on to catch up with the group.

In this connection, I remember an episode I read a long time ago. Dostoevsky, while visiting a museum in Basle, was transfixed in front of a painting of the crucified Jesus. According to the story, Dostoevsky stood there, apparently all alone, for a long time staring at the painting, “Descent from the Cross,” by Holbein. Perhaps because his reaction to the realistic painting that depicts the physical suffering of the divine being was so intense, he suffered an epileptic fit on the spot.

There are very few who can be captivated so intensely by a painting as Dostoevsky was. Although I wasn’t such a sensitive connoisseur of the arts as the Russian author and visionary, I used to prefer to visit a place—be it a museum, a church or even a public park—when I could spend as much time as I wanted, alone, so I could enjoy it.

But in this day and age when every well-known museum in major tourist destinations like Paris and London is packed with milling visitors, it is impossible for anyone to stand in front of a famous painting for a long time undisturbed.

The idea of going through such a vast and grand museum, for instance, as the Hermitage in St. Petersburg in Russia, in a couple of hours is ridiculous, even outrageous, and yet such, it seems, is the norm for any group tour these days.

Perhaps, it would be worthwhile to join such a tour if your purpose for visiting world famous places is to tell your friends and relatives about it as well as to remind yourself that “I have been there,” and to show the pictures or video clips to prove it. But of course, we all know that we like to visit well-known places to satisfy our intellectual curiosity and aesthetic senses.

Should I ever be able to visit Venice, I would go there not just to ride one of the gondolas through the canals or sip a cup of espresso sitting in the famous St. Marco Square, but rather to look at paintings by renaissance masters and cathedrals and other beautiful structures I had been introduced to through The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture, both by John Ruskin, among other books.

But if my experience during our visits to St. Petersburg and the Scandinavian capitals were any indication, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate all those wonderful buildings as well as works of arts, if I were to go there under the arrangement of a guided tour.

In St. Petersburg, in particular, I wanted to stroll around the Nevskii Prospekt, the bridges and embankments of the Neva River and the back alleys of the old Russian city, all of which have become familiar to me by reading and rereading the stories of Pushkin and Gogol. I had also hoped to have at least a glimpse of the apartments where Dostoevsky and Nabokov were said to have lived. But touring those places was impossible, unless I gave up the tight tour arrangements made by the travel agency.

Years ago, I visited the Grand Canyon. It was indeed a grand experience to stand on the edge of a rocky precipice and feel how great—how infinitely great—the works of nature were and, conversely, how tiny and insignificant I was in their midst. But later, I realized that we had only skimmed the surface of the Canyon. Far more magnificent and awe-inspiring spectacles were hidden, as it were, from us, I found out, when I went into a nearby theater and watched films that showed breathtaking, unbelievably beautiful views of the Canyon down below where we hadn’t had the time or energy to go.

Then, I thought that even if we like to travel, there is a limit to it, like everything else we do in this world, and that there are many places where we can only visit in our imagination aided by books and DVDs and television programs.

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