This morning in my course on David Foster Wallace, we discussed “Consider the Lobster,” an essay I introduced with words from his editors at Gourmet magazine: Jocelyn Zuckerman and Ruth Reichl. While discussion of the essay has tended to concentrate on Wallace’s bioethics argument, today we focused a good long time on his treatment of mass tourism. Consider this idea:

To be a mass-tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Debating this idea today brought to mind an essay by an incoming first-year writing faculty member, Shahnaz Habib, writing in The Guardian about being a little more choosy in our travel, doing only what’s of interest—not what’s iconic. It’s a lesson Shahnaz has taken from her father, and her essay is a great answer to Wallace.

Shahnaz is teaching a first-year writing seminar in the spring about fashion.