So, Your Humble Blogger was having this little conversation about pilgrimage, and we got to wondering about modern versions. In particular, I’m looking for things that we (mainstreamish Americans) do that involves (a) traveling to a particular place, (2) getting something whilst there (particularly of the tangible remnant variety, not just the commemorative spoon), and (iii) feeling afterward that the visit changed the visitor, with the souvenir of the visit the visible mark of the internal change.\n
In fact, I was just wondering about the importance of actually visiting anywhere. I get all misty-eyed at Fenway Park, at least until I remember how uncomfortable the seats are. I think, in a sense, some baseball fans make a pilgrimage to Fenway, but I don’t think they come away with any sense other than having done it. Similarly, for baseball fans, the National Baseball Hall of Fame is moving, but not that big a deal. A fan who has not visited the Hall of Fame doesn’t feel inferior, as a fan, to one who has.\n
The closest thing I could think of is the Vietnam Memorial, where people went and took rubbings, bringing home the paper impression of the names. Do people still do that? Or was it really just the close relatives of the dead, making it a collection of personal pilgrimages rather than an American pilgrimage? And is it just about closure, rather than about personal transformation?\n
I’ll expand the question, because I think it’s interesting: Where in the US is it important to actually visit in person? By important, I don’t mean important in the sense that everybody should do it, I mean that there is some important difference in physical presence, some reason to travel there. Other than the obvious, I mean, if you don’t actually go to Disneyland, you can’t ride the rides, and that Sidewalks of New York feeling is not easily represented at a distance. Those are, in a sense, technical problems; if you could<\/I>, then there would be no reason to go. For a pilgrim, there’s something that happens at the pilgrimage site that couldn’t happen anywhere else, and which produces a change in state that couldn’t happen by reading about the site, or seeing it on TV.\n
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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