Are Vacations Really Necessary?

By LANCE MORROW

When Rome fell, vacations and the tourist trade went into a slump that lasted in Western Europe for a thousand years. The medieval traveler making his way from one feudal barony to another navigated in hostile passages, always uncertain of refuge, as if a gargoyle Karl Maiden flapped after him, haunting him with visions of disaster. Some people setting off on vacation this season must believe that they have now arrived at a 20th century equivalent: a late Sunday afternoon on the American open road, the long procession of gas stations relentlessly shut down and the gauge's needle sinking like the setting sun toward Empty. If at last a gas line appears, winding up the road a quarter of a mile to an oasis of heraldic light, the effect is surreal: the machines in their idling file give off an almost animal heat, the drivers waiting inside them feeling anxious, vaguely betrayed (by Detroit, Carter, Schlesinger, OPEC, history) and sometimes alarmingly close to the Hobbesian state of nature.

Gas shortages across the U.S. have hardly initiated the new Middle Ages. But a skittish uncertainty about fuel, along with other factors like the stand-down of the DC-10 fleet and the way that dollars shrivel like cheap bacon when they go abroad, has begun to work changes in the way that Americans are approaching their annual ceremonies of leisure. Many vacations this year are being curtailed, especially the traditional summer trips that Americans en masse have taken since the early '50s--the long cross-country excursion by car. Now, having glimpsed the mortality of the machine, many Americans are planning trips no more than a tankful of gas away from their homes.

Travelers are still waiting to see if the inconvenience of the gas lines is going to disappear or grow worse. In the meantime, some are beginning to wonder a little whether the whole idea of the vacation--an institution sacrosanct in American habit--makes much sense.

The precise point of vacations is elusive--theoretically, anyway. Arnold Toynbee called the creative use of leisure "the mainspring of civilization." That sort of high-mindedness would surely ruin any holiday. In any case, vacations tend to divide into the active and the settled. Some wish to be invigorated, even chafed; they run down Deliverance rivers in canoes or else try to explore exotic civilizations (if they can pay the fare). The vacation-as-quest can have wonderful epiphanies. In 1939 the novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote to friends from Greece (for him an ancient world newly found): "The country is so still and wild; valleys unbelievably remote and pure . . . if ever there were valleys and enchanted places where the charm still holds good, it is here."

The difference between the active and the settled vacation is that the first often contains some stimulation of danger (however small or large) and the second is designed precisely to soothe, to eliminate threat. It is possible that those who do a certain amount of professional gang fighting tend to favor the settled vacation, while more regimented workers may prefer the adventurous vacation. But temperament is probably a more decisive factor. The most obvious purpose of vacations is contrast, interlude, a break in the pace.

The original Latin vacatio--an emptying, a suspension of normal activity, an absence of something--performs a small mystic flip when it encounters Pascal's thought: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." But vacations, in a secular sense, have an ancient history. Inns, restaurants, baths and theaters turned up in the archaeological digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii. For just as long, vacationers have been subdivided into spiritual castes: the enthusiasts who live all the rest of the year waiting for their temporary release, like school children in early June; and the possibly larger tribe that comes home every year from its outings, hurls suitcases into closets and vows never to do it again.

In 1941 the critic George Jean Nathan listed-- and dismissed-- some arguments behind "the vacation idea." Meet new people? "I have met hundreds upon hundreds of new people [on vacation] and you can have all but maybe six or seven of them for a nickel." Take things easy? "The more leisure you have, the more your cares will recur to you." Fun to just let go for a while? No, says Nathan: You eat too much, drink too much, spend too much. "You do everything, in short, that contributes to a magnificent case of physical, emotional, financial and spiritual katzenjammer." As for vacations with children, it was Nathan's contemporary Robert Benchley who wrote that "traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria."

Women's magazines every June or July publish chattily dire warnings about the "Vacation Blues." These articles are invariably accurate. One does expect too much from vacations and winds up feeling disappointed and even inadequate, as if one had somehow not lived up to the occasion. One does toss through the supposedly sweet idleness with a lump of Calvinist guilt under the mattress; the jauntily go-get-'em "I need some work to do" does conceal, for all its Freudian banality, some sense of unworthiness: you don't deserve the pleasure of a good vacation.

The real danger of the vacation lies in its capacity to compress all family conflicts into an exquisitely focused drama. At their most triumphantly awful, family vacations can compete with a Long Day's Journey Into Night or anything else O'Neill wrote. People in their normal working lives have jobs, roles, friends and routines to diffuse and absorb emotions. In the theater of a summer house, family issues 20 years buried are liable to come up thrashing like lobsters. The husband gets drunk and insults his visiting brother, who makes a ghastly effort to climb in bed with the au pair. The wife, who discovers that her vacation consists of the same cleaning and cooking that she enjoyed at home, considers swimming to the mainland in the middle of the night, since the ferryboats aren't running. If it is not O'Neill, then it is John Cheever. The creatures who most enjoy themselves may be the 15-year-old girls on the beach who all day squeeze lemon juice on their hair and lazily brush it in to make blond streaks; their faces as they do it are as perfectly empty as certain August afternoons.

Vacations may be pointless. The Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia once found themselves with an embarrassment of leisure. Their yams came up so abundantly that they had no need to work for their food. To occupy their excesses of spare time, the islanders devised the Kula, a ceremonial maritime exchange of economically worthless objects-- red shell necklaces and white shell bracelets. The Kula, in formal circuit around the islands, was the vacation and vocation of the people. They became their own quaintness, their own tourist trap. It is possible, in the end, that they even took American Express.

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