“In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”
—David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Machu Picchu, which my wife and I recently visited, is an epic monument to a poorly understood human past shrouded in mystery, unrecorded in written word, and not fully explicable, in my view and others’, in archaeology’s current form.
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To say that Machu Picchu is a scenic delight is to trivialize the experience; it is something more significant than delightful or scenic.
The getting to Machu Picchu is the arduous affair, which starts on the streets of Cusco, Peru, the access point to the train that ferries tourists by the thousands, and sometimes the tens of thousands, daily to the $250 million annual economic engine that is the Incan ruins.
Straight out of the airport gates, taxi drivers are ready for each new arrival of cash machines: “Hello, my friend, taxi?”
They’re not my friend, I understand; I’ve never met them. If I accepted a ride from them, they’d drop me off and never think about me again, unless they found me by chance once more on the streets of Cusco for a second round. It’s much lonelier to be called friend by a stranger than to be honestly sold a car ride.
Elderly ladies in the most flamboyant garb you can imagine lead around the city on leashes baby alpacas — adorned with colorful hairpieces like streetwalkers wear mini-skirts — harassing anyone foreign-looking to “hold baby alpaca,” the implication, at least for the trusting uninitiated, being one of a friendly gesture of welcome, only for them to request cash on the back end.
Every single tourist destination from Puno to Cusco to the Sacred Valley comes equipped with dozens and dozens of stalls manned (or wommaned, actually) by locals from whatever nearby village hocking artisanal-looking trinkets of various sorts.
I understand; people have to make money. It’s hard out there for everyone, most especially in the Third World. I don’t begrudge their hustle. In fact, I respect it.
But there’s something profoundly regretful, it seems to me, about something as ancient and beautiful and arguably sacrosanct as Machu Picchu given over to the crass machinations of commerce, which have the effect of reducing the experience to a curated service instead of whatever else it might be — a spiritual pilgrimage perhaps being hyperbole, but maybe something approaching that.
Maybe I think too much.
That’s probably it.
David Foster Wallace — the guy who wrote the quote at the top and also his own treatise on the melancholy of the tourist, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” — thought too much too, and he hung himself in his basement in 2008.
