I was recently thinking about the notion of the first tourist, i.e. the first person in human history to travel for recreational purposes.
It further occurred to me that someone in human history must have been the first person to go camping recreationally.
People did, of course, live in the woods and in crude shelters for much of early human history, and then for much more of human history used tents etc. when travelling or on military campaigns or as temporary shelters for various reasons, probably including in the course of travelling from Point A to Point B.
But someone was the first person to come up with the idea of travelling away from their home and whatever degree of shelter and civilization was baseline for them to a wilder, less developed place with less civilization, and spending some time there in a temporary shelter that provides less shelter and fewer amenities than usual, all for solely recreational purposes.
In the modern world, people who are into camping think spending time in nature is in some respect better than spending time in civilization. Some simply think it's pretty and relaxing, others go so far as to consider it very nearly virtuous. Someone in human history must also have been the first person to have this attitude! For so much of human history, people were just trying to survive - and, in fact, built up whatever level of civilization they had at the time for the purpose of surviving - that it would never occur to them that less civilization and more nature would be better. I'm sure if you put a prehistoric person in a modern-day shelter, they'd be so thrilled that temperature and wind and precipitation and darkness are rendered completely irrelevant and that they are absolutely certainly not going to get eaten by a wild animal that it wouldn't even occur to them to bemoan the fact that you can see things other than trees or that not all the stars are visible.
And then, someone was the first person to have the luxury of thinking that less shelter may have been better than more shelter.
5 comments:
Maybe some of the famous first campers, like John Muir and Thoreau, just copied the idea from the guy next door and took all the credit.
Or maybe hundreds of years earlier, some wealthy Lord of Manor made his servants carry tents into the woods and build a fire for him. And all the servants were rolling their eyes at how nuts their boss was, giving up his luxurious bed to sleep on the ground.
I like these mental exercises you are posing.
That notion of the nobleman having his servants set up his tent and build his fire makes me think of Marie Antoinette's little make-believe farm where she'd go and milk cows that had been specially bathed for the occasion.
I never heard of that! Along with the first tourist and the first camper, we can add the first person to go slumming.
Le Hameau de la Reine
Thanks!
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