Visit Topics

Even the simple act that we call “going to visit a person of our acquaintance” is in part an intellectual act. We fill the physical appearance of the person we see with all the notions we have about him, and in the totality of our impressions about him, these notions play the most important role.
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

Unfortunately, nearly all the “sights” in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers’ homes in the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy’s, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of “Didn’t he make a holy spectacle of himself?” An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)

“Why visit the playhouse to see the famous Parisian models, ... when one can see the French damsels, Norma and Diana? Their names have been known on both continents, because everything goes as it will, and those that cannot be satisfied with these must surely be of a queer nature.”
—For the City of New Orleans, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)