Alas! (thought I, and my heart beat loud)
How fast she nears and nears!
Are those her sails that glance in the Sun,
Like restless gossameres?
Are those her ribs through which the Sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a DEATH? and are there two?
Is DEATH that woman's mate?
-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The ocean is vast in its beauty. The nacreous blue of heaving waves, the sound of crashing rollers on the beach, and infinite vistas are offered by seascapes, ocean passages, and beach vacations. The ocean is timeless. Foamy waters carry goods and people and depths of meaning, transporting stories of our culture and our history. The universal appreciation of blue waters is evident everywhere: look to the history of conquest, to the force projection of aircraft carriers, or to the price of real estate on the coasts.
To encounter the sea, to apprehend its ineffable vastness and mythical depths, is a rite of passage. Any human being who has not seen the big water, or felt the saline air blow through their fingers, or waltzed up to foamy ripples with bare feet, is missing something cosmic and ineffable. If you’ve never seen the ocean, but also never tasted snow, or felt the heat of the desert, or hiked a mountain peak, go for the ocean first. It’s the most important, the most moving, the most enduring and impactful.
Being at sea, on a boat or ship, is an experience common to many and available to nearly all. To be afloat is to be embedded in a long chain from Homeric Greeks to Spanish conquerors to modern shipping conglomerates, transporting goods aboard enormous vessels, jammed in the Suez canal. To access this tradition, one can buy a kayak or make a friend with a boat, or perhaps splurge on a luxury yacht. The easiest, most luxurious way for many, however, will be to take a cruise.
But there is an intellectual and literary tradition of critiquing the cruise. For all the majesty and cultural history of ships on the sea, the modern cruise comes in for quite a bit of disdain. The sophisticate despises the very notion. David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is a classic of the essay genre. The recent essay by Gary Shteyngart in the Atlantic reminded me to write this. It’s been brewing in my mind for a long time.
The heart of Wallace’s piece, that famous critic of entertainment and postmodern nihilism, is a takedown of the cruiser’s desire for comfort. The need to be coddled and pampered and swathed in all the articles of infancy is a perversion of human desire.
Here’s the thing: A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that the ultimate American fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial strew of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to ‘triumph’ is via the rigors of self-improvement (diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, Franklin Quest time-management seminars), to which the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsuitable analogue. But there’s another way out, too: not titivation but titillation; not hard work but hard play. See in this regard the 7NC’s constant activities, festivities, gaiety, song; the adrenaline, the stimulation. It makes you feel vibrant, alive. It makes your existence seem non-contingent. The hard-play option promises not a transcendence of death-dread so much as just drowning it out.
I am sympathetic to this viewpoint. The cruise can easily be identified with our most pathetic and childlike impulses: I will eat when I want; I require a 24-hour buffet. I will drink to excess. I will lounge in the sun as the landscapes pass me by. I will expend no personal energy as a vast, diesel-burning leviathan chokes through azure waters. My skin will pink, my belly will grow, and I will learn nothing.
Fortunately, all of this excess, this gross overindulgence, pales in comparison to the vast allure of the pumping ocean. The raw experience of being at sea cannot, for these critics, be separated from indulgent self-gratification. Pleasure is, in this case, insuperable from the more base, fundamental drives to exploration and adventure. To cruise, uncharitably, is to be plumped and pampered and gratified, an experience which might just as easily occur in a mega-resort or a ritzy downtown 5-star. It is these desires, rather than the spirit of the water, that comes under the microscope. The feeling of flying over cresting whitecaps, below which teem untold life and mystery, is not the focus of the critique. After all, the endless passing by of iridescent, dynamic blue waters only amounts to what Shteyngart calls “a kind of cheap eternity.”
Worse yet, particularly evident in Shteyngart’s piece, cruisers are commoners. He laments that he might not be able to talk to “these people.” After all, what are cruises most famous for in our modern, panic-stricken world? The spreading of norovirus. The horror of the unwashed milling about, idly shedding SARS-CoV2 through every nook and cranny. The respectable critic has no Brooklyn brownstone to retreat to, and must suffer through the lot of regular folk who must be dead inside to find themselves aboard a cruise.
Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large.
Being on a cruise is being locked into a destination with thousands of other people. No agency, no control, no direction. You won’t find the “best spots” that “aren’t touristy” because every one of your copassengers, your shipmates, has access to all of them. There are no hidden back bars, no locals to drink with, no experiences that feel “authentic” or “original.” And this tragedy of travel may be perhaps the most devastating to the sophisticate. There is nothing more. What you see is all there is.
And this attitude pervades, in a kind of broad elite cultural condescension. Rich people don’t cruise. Maybe they have a yacht. Maybe they sail on the weekends.
At it’s worst, then, being on a cruise is like being on a bus. Sure, it’s a “vacation,” but is it your vacation? Are you achieving anything, or are you just “doing tourism?” Are you special, or are you just like everyone else? The answers to these questions might be enough to bring the sophisticate critic to tears.
Before Covid, I was traveling by myself in Europe. I had to get myself and my baggage from my Berlin Air BnB to a Hamburg hostel. I had a vague sense that German trains were reliable, and so chose to be adventurous (though not adventurous enough to seek out another Mitfahrgelegenheit) and simply arrive at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. I woke up with some eye pain, then cleaned my room, packed my bags, and left.
I lugged my suitcase to the Mauerpark, where I noticed a young American man, singing and playing guitar, his case open before him for tips. I admired him. I hauled my gear up the hill in the sun, and I watched my dear friends create beautiful graffiti on the remnants of the Berlin wall, my eye swelling.
Afterwards, I walked through the heat to catch a bus to the train station. I booked a ticket without recognizing the warnings that the train was full. So I stood on that train, guarding my belongings, for several hours and watched the countryside of north Germany whisk by, my eye bleating, my back aching.
In that moment, I was experiencing the reliable pain of travel. Whether bending my knees on a German train, waiting at the TSA line in Cleveland, or searching for lost bags in Guyaquil, this pain can be found among travelers everywhere. Unlike the romantic, expansive grand tours of old, traveling today is about minimizing the time spent in transit, because the transit is so miserable. We’d prefer to drive rather than walk, fly rather than train, and teleport rather than anything else. We are going somewhere, and all these other passengers, the other cars in traffic, are in the way.
The idea that moving around could itself be rewarding, rather than merely a means to an end, is foreign. At least it was foreign to me, swaying among so many German strangers in 2019. No one pays extra for a layover.
Cruising is different from ocean transport. As recently as 100 years ago, ships were still the most effective and efficient way to travel between continents. As such, the sophisticate writer does not find himself assaulting the ocean liner, like Queen Mary II or Titanic. The tuxedos and champagne, the rich and famous, and Jack Dawson were going somewhere - to adventure in America, or to start a new business, or to do something more dignified than mere entertainment. Cruisers are not afforded the humane luxury of a telos. They are simply floating about, fat, drunk, and sunburned.
So both Wallace and Shteyngart reserve their criticism for the modern instantiation of floating hotels rather than traditional cruise liners. Even though today a passenger can fly across the Atlantic in six hours rather than sail across it in six days, choosing the later still affords an air of urbanity and sophistication. The ocean-liner admits of a tradition which carries the momentum of classiness - a term too infrequently used - despite all the trappings of a modern cruise.
Of course, lounging in the sun with an umbrella’d drink should be enjoyable, if only for a moment. It may not be for everyone. But we can hardly condemn our fellow man for enjoying nature’s gifts of warmth and intoxication. But the discerning critic cannot allow himself to enjoy these gifts, even if he has paid $19,000 for the privilege. He prefers the “authentic” experience offered by the “respite” of land, “where God intended humans to be.”
“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”
“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”
But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.
The cruise, then, is an orgiastic overindulgence in base pleasure, an inefficient mode of travel, anti-authentic, and filled with common people too dumb or dead inside to know any better. The tradition of writing incredibly harsh critiques of cruising, and more to Shteyngart’s point, the people who do it, is ultimately an expression of a fear of these components.
Our culture’s taste for authenticity, real experiences, and unique destinations is at risk of imploding on itself. There is some substantial chance that every niche or personal experience will eventually be chopped down into TikTok-sized bites, and shared so widely and completely that authenticity will cease to be possible. The sophisticate critic, then, is ultimately expressing a disgust for this tendency and that they might fall prey to it. Through savagely dismissing the cruise, and cruisers, the writer can distance himself - surely he is the master of his own desires, has refined taste, individualized experience, and is not just going through the motions of life. He is wide awake, not dead inside. He sees through the bread and circuses of modern entertainment and leisure culture; he is not among those foolish enough to be taken in by floating cities. But unfortunately for him, and for all of us, he’s just a human too.
And a ship is not just a floating hotel. A ship is, at its core, about transporting people - whether in luxury or at military readiness. Being aboard one means you’ve thrown your lot in with the other passengers, means you are one of the masses who’ve entrusted their care and custody to a captain. This fact alone, I think, is a foundational reason for the sophisticate cruise critique. Who wants to be like everyone else? By enduring a voyage with those of lesser taste or education, we can reassure ourselves that we are not. Of course, this is a lie.
What I say to Shteyngart or any other would-be sophisticate is: Have you never felt the call of the ocean? Have you never dreamed of sailing across the world? Are you idealistic enough to see the beauty of the impoverished Caribbean port cities? Are you realistic enough to know that you don’t want to stay in paradise forever? Does the setting sun over infinite midnight-blue stir nothing in your heart? Or are you too pissed off that somebody, or some thousands of somebodys, are enjoying their margaritas a bit too boorishly, a bit too close for comfort? Or is it that you're one of those somebodies too?
Maybe it is better that cruisers and sophisticates stay separate. For some people, all travel is, or ever should be, is the cheapest, quickest way from point A to point B. Every extra minute spent in transit is one lost to time, one less authentic selfie you could have taken, one extra spot in line for that exclusive Berlin club. Honk at the car in front of you when the light turns green. Put your headphones on on the subway. These aren’t people about you - your experience really begins once you’ve left them all behind.
When I returned from that 2019 trip in Europe, I wore sunglasses in the Copenhagen airport. Not against the Scandinavian sun, this was to cover up my horrendously swollen face, lest any of my cotravellers in the enormous immigration line should recoil from my monstrous appearance.
When I reached the line’s end, the police officer asked me to remove my glasses. She jumped a bit at my face, then allowed me to put them back down.
To characterize my mood at this juncture, I was somewhere between “prickly” and “enraged.” The best version of myself in an airport is already a significant downgrade from the everyday. Plus, I had endured uncomfortable travel, long lines, and officious bureaucrats. I had to bare a somewhat disfigured appearance in front of friends and strangers. I had a transatlantic flight in economy to look forward to; I was hungry and exhausted.
I decided the next time I traveled, I would do it in style and comfort.
I may be a “large, breasty gentleman,” and critiquing me may even be an example of “low hanging fruit.” But even on a cruise, even me, forehead villainous low, I find a way to lead an interior life. I find a way to make my peace in the seething crowds, anxious to get through. I find a way to not hate myself for being among them.
For the sophisticate, a cruise is a messy place. Untold strangers are exercising their poor taste around you. Illnesses spread due to careless hygienic practices or just bad luck. There are not infinite options - you are literally limited spatially, even as you traverse hundreds of miles by sea - and even 15 bars on the world’s largest ship can feel stifling rather than liberatory. Someone else - it doesn’t matter who, because it isn’t you - drives and navigates. Official-looking employees tell you what to do. The heaving, unsteady sea never lets you find your sea legs. You want to know where you are but can’t look past all the lowbrows having fun. Even when you do enjoy yourself, you can’t help but feel guilty for all the problems going unsolved, your own contributions to them, and the emptiness and inadequacy of your experience. You are surrounded by people who don’t understand you, who can’t understand you, and who might even hate you, because you don’t realize the “championship” of football is called the Superbowl, you dumbass.
When I look at the world, I see our island home hurtling through unknown space, with no evident driver or pilot. I see untold masses around me, exercising poor taste and worse judgement, gratifying themselves even as they fail to understand who they are or what they’re doing. I feel guilty about my lack of individuality, and fight to be a person, to have my own story, to be somebody rather than nobody. I feel the world telling me what to do, and I want to go my own way. When I think about these problems, I could get despondent, angry, and downright misanthropic. I could disdain, declaim, and separate myself as superior. I could lament being trapped on this earth with billions of other people who don’t understand me, who could never truly know me, who might even hate me.
Or I could realize that I’m one of them, too.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie:
And a thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I