Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing skewers the tourist imagination with a metaphor that lands like a quiet slap: the “pleasure resort” isn’t just a place, it’s a celebrity. Like film stars and royalty, it exists most powerfully as a projection machine. People who’ve never been there build an inner movie of ease, glamour, and uncomplicated happiness, then arrive expecting the set to obey the script. The result is that peculiar modern disappointment where reality feels like it’s failing at its job.

The line works because it flips the usual power dynamic. We think of resorts as designed to please us, but Lessing suggests they’re the ones made “embarrassed” by what we demand of them. That embarrassment is the subtext: fantasies are often tacky, repetitive, and oddly entitled. They flatten real places into consumable images, then punish the place for having weather, staff, locals, history. In the same way, celebrities are treated less like people than like screens onto which strangers throw desire, envy, and moral judgment.

Contextually, Lessing is writing out of a 20th-century sensibility alert to mass culture’s distortions: the postwar rise of package travel, the glossy travel brochure, the way media manufactures “must-see” dreams. Her phrasing, “the figures they cut,” is tellingly theatrical - these resorts are costumed and posed, forced into shapes that aren’t theirs. The jab isn’t at leisure itself; it’s at the way fantasy colonizes experience, turning both people and places into embarrassed props for someone else’s story.