Simone de Beauvoir

"Ich möchte vom Leben alles. Ich möchte eine Frau, aber auch ein Mann sein, viele Freunde haben und allein sein, viel arbeiten und gute Bücher schreiben, aber auch reisen und mich vergnügen, egoistisch und nicht egoistisch sein ..." (1947)

"In meinem ganzen Leben bin ich niemandem begegnet, der so zum Glück begabt gewesen wäre wie ich - auch niemandem, der sich mit gleicher Hartnäckigkeit darauf versteift hätte."

On Top

It was nothing what you would call an everyday-experience. Twenty people who usually share offices, books and thoughts went for a weekend into the woods. In a particular moment they were forced to split up into smaller groups and got the order to solve challenging tasks under the leadership of one outstanding person.

One of the groups had a special struggle with the doors, simply because there was none in the woods. So they started walking up the hills, trying to reach even higher peaks and hoping that they would be able to see some doors from over there.

To make it short: They could not find any. But they found other beautiful things up there. Especially one of the group members got a gift. He was almost running up the mountains, leading the group, although he was not the leader, because everything around him seemed familiar. And then, he reached the peak of one of the mountains, he took of his hat, waved it around excitedly. Only seconds passed and he stood still, took a deep breath, enjoyed the marvellous view and knew: He was back home again.

Sad Tourists?

When I call myself an everyday-tourist, I have to clarify what I mean by 'tourist'. Friends of mine introduced me to the works of Zygmunt Bauman, who characterizes the tourist as follows:
The tourist, “like the vagabond, he is everywhere he goes in, but nowhere of the place he is in.” The tourist has a home and moves purposeful: “The opposition ‘here I am but visiting, there is my home’ stays clear-cut as before, but it is not easy to point out where the ‘there’ is.” There is a home. But, where about? He concludes from this that tourists also are homesick in the same moment as they are afraid of home-boundedness, “of being tied to a place and barred from exit”. Altogether, it sounds really sad, being a tourist. The German movie “Nichts als Gespenster” (review) seems to take up the same argument. People in their thirties, tourists, are not able to establish relationships. (According to Mary Douglas relationships are actually what constitute a “home”.)
Perhaps, I am a total optimist, but is it not the other way round? By being a tourist people learn, that it is not the space which makes a home, but the relationships with others. Do not become relationships apart from those with our families more and more important in our lives? That would also enable us to judge differently networks like Facebooks and myspace, which enable us to take up contact with people again, which would have disappeared forever without those platforms.
A tourist in this more positive interpretation is a person which finds his/her home in relationships rather than in fixed places.