You spend all year queuing on the ring road, and then you go on holiday. And you queue again, among other tourists. Stendhal syndrome needs a new name: not fainting before beauty, but the nervous breakdown on the way to reach it.
Stendhal syndrome needs a new name: not fainting before beauty, but the nervous breakdown on the way to reach it.
There is a video showing a column of people advancing in tiny, very slow steps towards something you cannot see yet: the Seceda, in Val Gardena, in July.
I am watching the video from the armchair I settled into at eleven in the morning. The air conditioning is at twenty-one degrees; the mimosa on ice is doing that pleasant thing where the glass sweats, and you don’t.
I have been watching a lot of these videos for a few weeks now, and I have learned to recognise the recurring numbers. There are the ones who post the photo captioned: “See you up there, it was worth the wait.” As if anyone could say otherwise. If this many people are willing to wait, it simply must be worth it.
Then there is the fake indignation of those pretending to discover only now that Venice, Rome or the beach at Stintino is crowded: imagine that, they thought they had had such an original idea… It is always, clearly, other people’s fault; never ours. How many times, walking into a bar or a restaurant, have we said: “Does nobody work anymore?”
Everything about it is already known: a column of people advances slowly towards a predetermined spot, photographed a hundred million times already, and we make it a hundred million and one. A practice halfway between the mystical and the penitential; a pilgrimage without God, but with the blisters.
There is nothing left to discover, only something to certify. Contemporary tourism does not take us towards the unknown: it leads us inside images we already know, so that we can prove we have been inside them. And yet, though the photo counts for plenty, I am not sure this is only a photographic matter. Or rather: it is not that we want to take the photo, it is that we travel towards the photo. We desire what we see every day.
The most boring explanation — which is also, unfortunately, the truest — is that this country was not built to be stormed from January to December: Val Gardena in July, the Cinque Terre in mid-August, Lake Braies on a Sunday morning. The infrastructure is thirty years old, the spaces are not American spaces, but the desire belongs to an age in which everyone has a phone.
This country was not built to be stormed from January to December.
You see certain queues and think it might be better to go back to the office. In New York, in fact, someone has turned it into a job. They are called line sitters: professional queuers who charge fifty dollars for the first two hours and twenty-five for each hour after that, with surcharges for rain, extreme heat and public holidays. Because discomfort has a price.
One client, according to the news reports, hired five of them at once to buy two cakes in every flavour from one of those Manhattan bakeries whose queue is a constitutive part of the identity: without the queue, the cake would just be a cake.
Without the queue, the cake would just be a cake.
That someone is willing to pay not to stand in line, while refusing to give up the cake, I understand. That someone queues for free, less so. Call me a sociopath, but isn’t it better to stay home?
In August, English Heritage, the body that manages England’s historic monuments, raffles off twenty minutes alone in the heart of Stonehenge: buy a ticket in advance and you are automatically entered. The rules of the draw are explicit: do not touch the stones, do not lean on them, do not sit on them. Solitude, then, is included in the prize. It strikes me as the one premium feature I would pay gold for.
Perhaps we have too much free time and too little imagination to fill it in any way that does not require other people’s validation. I do not know which is rarer, nonconformity or taste. So we choose experiences already seen, already photographed and already approved by enough strangers to make them reliable; experiences that require no explanations and no choices, that demand nothing more than the willingness to wait.
The queue, in this sense, is the algorithm of contemporary tourism: it establishes where to go, when to go and how long one should expect to wait. And it exempts us from deciding, which remains the most tiring part of autonomy. Contemporary tourism concentrates on small portions of territory. Perhaps it was always like this, but now the situation has got worse.
The queue, unlike the summit, is narratively rich: it lasts a long time, it involves measurable discomfort, and it lends itself to both the horizontal and the vertical shot. And it probably grants the illusion of having achieved something. The summit is merely beautiful; the queue produces content.
The summit is merely beautiful; the queue produces content. It will probably be the only thing from that day anyone actually watches again.
If the queue has become the experience, watching it from home is particularly satisfying. We used to go to the cinema to live other people’s lives. Now we watch people who made worse choices than ours. And we feel better for not being there.