"Wherever we go, across the Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as 'the bizarre'. Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else"
About this Quote
Travel, Beard suggests, is less a passport stamp than a confrontation with your own assumptions. Her point isn’t that foreign places are inherently strange; it’s that strangeness is relational. What reads as “bizarre” to the visitor is simply the local default setting, the kind of ordinary no one bothers to notice until an outsider stumbles over it.
The line works because it flips the usual travel narrative. Instead of promising revelation about “them,” Beard frames travel as a diagnostic test for “us.” The astonishment is a self-report: a record of what your home culture trained you to treat as natural, inevitable, even moral. When those habits stop being shared, your mind labels the mismatch “bizarre” to defend its own normality. That single quoted word - the bizarre - reads like a warning label on the traveler’s gaze: you are about to confuse difference with absurdity.
As a historian, Beard is also writing against the comforting idea that progress, civilization, or “human nature” looks the same everywhere. Her era (early 20th century, with mass tourism expanding and American global power rising) produced plenty of confident generalizations about other societies. Beard punctures that confidence. The subtext is methodological: if you want to understand another place, start by distrusting your first reaction. Surprise is evidence, but it’s evidence about the observer’s frame, not the observed world.
It’s a tidy rebuke to cultural arrogance, delivered without sermonizing: the joke is on the traveler, and the punchline is their own shock.
The line works because it flips the usual travel narrative. Instead of promising revelation about “them,” Beard frames travel as a diagnostic test for “us.” The astonishment is a self-report: a record of what your home culture trained you to treat as natural, inevitable, even moral. When those habits stop being shared, your mind labels the mismatch “bizarre” to defend its own normality. That single quoted word - the bizarre - reads like a warning label on the traveler’s gaze: you are about to confuse difference with absurdity.
As a historian, Beard is also writing against the comforting idea that progress, civilization, or “human nature” looks the same everywhere. Her era (early 20th century, with mass tourism expanding and American global power rising) produced plenty of confident generalizations about other societies. Beard punctures that confidence. The subtext is methodological: if you want to understand another place, start by distrusting your first reaction. Surprise is evidence, but it’s evidence about the observer’s frame, not the observed world.
It’s a tidy rebuke to cultural arrogance, delivered without sermonizing: the joke is on the traveler, and the punchline is their own shock.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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