Laudator Temporis Acti

Waverley Root (1903-1982), The Food of France (1958; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1992), pp. 294-295:

Languedoc is not the country for the tourist who wants to be called for by a chauffeur in a private car (if he is well off) or to pile into a bus equipped with a loudspeaker and a guide obsessed with the idea that it must not be allowed to go unused (if he, or more often she, is not so well off), in order to be transported, hermetically isolated from the possible contagion of the surrounding country, to the noteworthy object and allowed to photograph it during the period allotted to it by a travel agency schedule; who then desires to be fed in a restaurant that can give him the same sort of meal he has eaten in every other restaurant he has ever patronized; and who finally requires some sort of standardized entertainment to banish boredom between dinner and bed. Because Languedoc has not vet been completely regimented, this is country which should be particularly attractive to the traveler who has not yet become resigned to being packaged, as well as to the diner who is not afraid to broaden the scope of his collection of tastes. The genuine traveler is advised to hurry if he wants to see Languedoc in something like its pristine innocence. The better-known tourist meccas can hold only so many persons, so the constant mounting of the tourist horde is forcing the flood into hitherto unexplored territories, preceded by travel agents whose duty it is to explain to local populations that tourists travel hundreds of miles from their own homes because they want to find in distant places replicas as like what they have left as possible.

The blight has already begun to invade Languedoc. I remember, nearly thirty years ago, spending a delightful idle aimless afternoon wandering about the Pont du Gard, that remarkable remnant of a Roman aqueduct, then traversing the trickle of river beneath it in the midst of a wilderness where nothing distracted from the spectacle of the weathered stones marching through the country of which they had become a part. But five years ago, when I went back, there were a modern hotel and a restaurant with large windows which permitted you to sit comfortably behind a table and look at the Pont du Gard as if it were on a television screen without establishing any personal contact with it. Someone had been tidying up the place, too—cutting grass, removing brush, and planting other brush where it would never have occurred to an independent bush to establish residence. I would have felt conspicuous to have wandered about and around the bridge and the Gard aimlessly, as I had done twenty-five years before, especially in my customary shameless state, naked of cameras.

The modern building was a violation of the setting, whose essence had been the absence of modernity. By breaking up the unity of the setting, it detached the Pont du Gard from it, too, and it had ceased to be an outgrowth of the country. It had become an isolated object, which might be viewed quite as profitably in a motion-picture theater. You cannot maintain interest in an isolated object for very long. It has to be related to a larger entity to have real meaning. The traveler visits the object on the spot to see it as part of the whole; the tourist visits it, under conditions which safely protect him from any spontaneity, to detach it from the whole and add it to his private collection of trinkets. Unfortunately the elaborate machinery by which he achieves this desire detaches the objects trom their settings for all other viewers, too. If, therefore, you are a traveler rather than a tourist, you are recommended to visit Languedoc, still largely unspoiled, and to do it soon. It cannot possibly last long.

Pont du Gard