In this wide-ranging interview, Emily Thomas talks about the importance of perspective and time in travel writing, how sublime moments of pleasurable terror make travel so interesting, how to overcome fears both real and imaginary, as well as the ethics of doom tourism, and how VR (virtual reality) might change how we travel in future.

Dr. Emily Thomas is an associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in England. She’s also the author of several books, including The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad.

• Traveling is about experiencing otherness, going to places that are new and unfamiliar and trying to figure out how to make sense of them


• Sublime moments in travel as a kind of pleasurable terror


• Tackling fears, both real and imagined


• Research before a trip, and arriving in Malawi, Africa


• How do travel books blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and why is this so important to address stereotypes


• “There is no view from nowhere.” Perspective in travel writing


• Maps as processes, and how they change over time. The importance of knowing ‘when’ a book was written and the perspective of the writer.


• Doom tourism


• How VR (virtual reality) might improve aspects of travel, and what we want to keep as in-person experiences


• Recommended travel books

You can find Emily at www.EmilyThomasWrites.co.uk and on Twitter @emilytwrites

Shareable and header image generated by Jo Frances Penn on Midjourney.

Transcript of interview (lightly edited)

Jo Frances Penn

Dr. Emily Thomas is an associate professor in philosophy at Durham University in England. She’s also the author of several books, including The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad, which we’re talking about today. So welcome, Emily.

Emily Thomas

Hello. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Jo Frances Penn

I’m excited to talk about this topic.

What drew you to write a book about travel and philosophy, since one seems quite internal, and the other one quite external?

Emily Thomas

That’s right. So I have been a professional philosopher for more than 10 years, but far longer than that I have been a backpacker. So I did buckets of traveling when I was younger. And at some point, when I was writing about philosophy, I began wondering, does philosophy have anything to say about travel? Is there some way that I can bring these two parts of my life together, and I started doing some research. And to my delight, I found that philosophy has lots to say about travel. And that was how the book was born.

Jo Frances Penn

What does travel mean to you?

Emily Thomas

For me, traveling is all about experiencing otherness. It’s all about going to places that are new and unfamiliar. And trying to figure out how to make sense of them, how to map them on to the world that you do know.

My best travel experiences have actually been ones where I have gone to some place where I haven’t understood anything around me. Not not the language, not what’s going on in the street, not the social cues and I have very slowly, by reading and talking to people, come to put the pieces together and come to understand the place.

Jo Frances Penn

That’s interesting. So you have otherness and the new and the unfamiliar. Does that mean that for you, traveling say within England, doesn’t count as travel?

Emily Thomas

There are definitely places within England that I don’t know at all and might give me that travel unfamiliarity experience. But you’re right, I think that to be really immersed in the unknown for me, I’m going to have to go farther afield than that.

Jo Frances Penn

Absolutely. So you have this chapter on sublime tourism, which is so often the special moments we remember, rather than all the difficulties around it.

Tell us a bit more about some of your own sublime moments in travel.

Emily Thomas

So I should explain that I use the word sublime in a technical way, to mean a very specific kind of feeling that was picked out by 18th-century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke.

When you have a sublime feeling, it’s a kind of pleasurable terror. So it’s the kind of enjoyable fear that you get from standing close to a waterfall, but not too close. You can feel the spray on your face, but you’re not actually afraid of falling over.

And I had definitely had a lot of those kinds of moments whilst traveling that often because I’ve done almost all my traveling by myself, just rocking up in a new place that I find really terrifying. And also really exciting on the other. I think the first time I really powerfully experienced that. I was 18. And I spent a couple of months wandering around China, the very first time I arrived in a big new city, and I stepped out of the hotel room, just not understanding anything that was going on around me it was really scary, but also exhilarating.

<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_824"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-824">Forbidden City, Beijing. Photo licensed from BigStockPhoto</figcaption></figure>

Jo Frances Penn

That’s really interesting that you call it that ‘pleasurable terror.’ And in the book, you also quote Camus, “what gives the value to travel is fear.” And it’s interesting.

You talk there about terror, you’re using the word fear in the book.

What are some of the fears that you’ve had to face? When have they been real? When have they been imagined?

Emily Thomas

Some of the fears, I think, are very reasonable to have and they are not pleasurable. So for example, walking through a city by yourself where you’re conscious that it’s not very safe, that the crime rates are very high, and you’re afraid of being attacked or mugged. That’s not fun. They are not imagined fears either.

But I think there are other fears are more exciting. And in a pleasurable way. I might have a fear that if I walk into a city I don’t know very well. I’m going to get lost. Well, actually, really, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? You know, I get lost it and I ended up asking for directions in a coffee shop or something. The feeling of oh, maybe I could be lost. That’s quite nice.

Have I personally been in some scrapes? I have. What especially springs to mind when people ask me that question. I was once in a taxi in Zimbabwe that caught fire, and the driver refused to pull over. It was just there was smoke, I mean, we could see flames on the bonnet. And he was like, no, it’ll be fine, like we don’t have to stop the car.

Jo Frances Penn

Oh, wow. Okay. So you’ve talked about solo travel, and fear of being attacked, specifically as a solo woman. I mean, that can happen if one is just in London late at night or in Newcastle late at night or something. I mean, that doesn’t have to be a foreign fear.

But if it’s in a foreign country, it feels like things will just be more difficult, even like asking someone where the bathroom is, like when I traveled in India, that can be a moment of fear.

How can we overcome some of these fears in order to travel to new places?

Emily Thomas

I’ve recently been reading about stoicism, which is a particular kind of philosophy dating back to Roman times. And one of the suggestions they have is that when you’re afraid of something, you should actually sit down in your mind and work through what could possibly happen. Like what is the worst case scenario? And how would you deal with that, if that comes up.

And I personally get scared by the unknown. So the idea of landing in a new place that I find quite scary, I find it scary, because I have no idea what to expect when I’m there. But if I actually really go back and start thinking, Okay, this is where I want to go. And okay, and this is how taxis or whatever it might work here. The more knowledge that I have about the place that I find that the fear goes away. It’s like horror movies, right? You know, the unseen monster or ghost is always much scarier than when you actually see the ridiculous special effects that the producer has drummed up for your movie entertainment delight,

Jo Frances Penn

Which is why you don’t often see the monster — then the actual fear is like, Oh, right. It’s just another vampire.

Emily Thomas

Yeah, exactly. Right.

Jo Frances Penn

That’s really interesting that you say that in terms of a guidebook, for example. So let’s put that under the category of research. You can research a place and for me, it’s like I often I will research lots of places, but then I just concentrate on getting off the plane to the first night’s accommodation.

And even if I’m doing more free