Thoughts and reflections on vacation, some meditations on this summer popular topic by different and famous authors, writers and artists to enrich our holidays.
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony – this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
Jean Baudrillard
Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
John Kenneth Galbraith
More than just yearly rituals in which we connect with friends and family, vacations are also exercises in self-definition. In affording time away from the demands of everyday life, vacations disclose what people choose to do rather than are required to do.
Cindy Sondik Aron
Sometimes a vacation helps restore peace in families. But you have to find the right method. My brother did this: after a whole year spent sticking together with his wife, he said: «Carme’, this year I want to take a healthy vacation». «Genna’, and how do you take a healthy vacation?» «Say hello to us here, we’ll catch up on the way back!»
Alessandro Siani
Vacations are designed to refresh the outlook of everyone. No matter how tired they may be when they return to work, vacationers have been refreshed emotionally and intellectually. Their effectiveness in their job has probably improved, and they are, generally speaking, better employees for the time off.
Robert J. Fischer
What distinguishes a true samurai from other characters is that the original fighter always walks with death at his side and always trains, with his mind above all, instead of going on vacation, even when it’s a holiday.
Carl William Brown
[My wife and I] argued and butted heads for a while, and finally decided that it would be better to take a vacation or get a divorce. We discussed it calmly, like mature people, and we decided to get a divorce because we could only spend so much. And besides, a vacation in Bermuda lasts two weeks, whereas a divorce lasts a lifetime.
Woody Allen
These young people lack neither character nor good aptitude nor diligence: but they have not been given time to give themselves direction, rather they have been accustomed, from childhood, to receive direction. When they were mature enough to be “sent into the desert”, something else was done instead – they were used, they were alienated from themselves, they were educated to be used daily, they created for them a theory of duties out of all this – and now they cannot do without it and do not want anything else. The fact remains that these poor draft animals cannot be refused “holidays” – as this ideal of idleness of a century exhausted by too much work is called: in which it is permitted for once to abandon oneself to laziness and to become stupid and childish at one’s pleasure.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Every year, at the beginning of summer, we read learned analyses of staggered holidays, “hit and run” vacations, reasonable departures (intelligent, it seems excessive). Then comes Ferragosto and everything is as usual: people, if they can, don’t stay at home. We bite, yes, but only if they don’t let us escape along crowded highways. It’s not clear whether we are forced (closed offices, shops too), or instead we love the collective ritual and its barbaric aspects: crowds, queues, waiting, suffering and complaints.
Beppe Severgnini
I never went on vacation with my father, also because my father spent his vacations, about fifteen days in August, painting the apartment under the watchful, attentive and slightly annoying guidance of my mother. Those were the years of the economic boom in Italy, but in our house there was very little money going around. Later we could also go on vacation, and in fact on some occasions both my mother and I had taken vacations, but my father never, by now he had gotten used to it and didn’t even miss it. Now I don’t remember those August months of so many years ago very well, but one thing I know for sure, they were the best times of my life.
Carl William Brown
When it comes to the summer months most people start to think about where they will be going on vacation. This is the time of year when most individuals take time off of work because the kids are out of school. It is the perfect time for everyone to spend time together and to regroup from the stress that is often experienced with everyday life.
Cindy Crawford
The current Western concept of holidays is as ferocious as the very concept of work, not only because it interferes profoundly with the sense of freedom, but because it transforms and distorts its meaning. During the holidays, millions of people are forced to have fun, just as during the rest of the year they are forced to work tirelessly, to dream of finding a job or to recover from breakdowns and illnesses, caused by forced and daily work activity.
Silvano Agosti
I really love visiting cities of art on vacation. On vacation I go looking for asphalt like a pointer dog looks for a pheasant. What’s better than Madrid in August? Maybe Ibiza in August, but you have to be normal. Instead of a pedal boat, the subway. Instead of a walk by the sea, the queue in front of the museum. Instead of a fresh coconut, a hot orangeade. Then I go home pretty gaunt, but with a brain like that. And double the two bullshit.
Luciana Littizzetto
Capitalist societies first reduce a lot of people to poverty and then they commission sociologists and statistics professors to do research on poverty and that’s how we discover that the poor generally don’t have much money, they are numerous, they are usually poorly educated, although not always, they generally come from poor areas of the territory and so on, they spend little, they go to the theater little, they don’t go on vacation, they are vulgar, they wash little, and so on and so forth.
Carl William Brown
Luckily, every year, the holidays arrive, right on time. So we can get rid of those tired eyes of a hen struggling to lay an egg, that color of ice cream licked by a child, with all the flavors mixed together. And, with the holidays, comes the time to cast off. Unplug. Find peace. In the summer, all I want to do is sit on a deckchair and stay there. Still. I want the only thing that moves in me to be the dandruff. And if someone asks me: “What are you doing tonight?”, I already have the answer ready: “Nothing. At most I’ll peel the peppers”.
Luciana Littizzetto
On paper, vacations are always great. They’re supposed to save your marriage, get you healthy, promote world peace, make your skin glow again… The truth is, if you do them right, they’re worse than work. They’re like a cruise with diarrhea. You spend a lot of money sleeping in airports, lugging suitcases that weigh twice as much as you do, eating food that’s impossible to identify, and entrusting your safety to people you’ve never met before.
Erma Bombeck
Every “employee” has one. They are evil clouds that hide behind the mountains for up to 12 months, but when they realize that their man is about to go on vacation, they fall on his head, unloading a square of hail on the back of his neck in a meter by meter and accompany him relentlessly.
Paolo Villaggio
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag
I am an absolute libertarian, and I think that every restriction is a limit to the healthy economic progress of humanity, for this reason I would not only prohibit murderers from going to prison, buildings that among other things I would immediately abolish, together with all those sordid characters that animate the world of politics and justice, but I would also give them a nice prize. Maybe a prize vacation in China, why not?
Carl William Brown
Oh, why can’t we break away from all this, just you and I, and lodge with my fleas in the hills? I mean, flee to my lodge in the hills.
S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Sheekman
If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks’ vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
If you go on holiday by motorbike, things take on a completely different aspect. In a car you are always in a cockpit; you are used to it and you do not realize that everything you see from that window is nothing but an extra dose of TV. You are a passive observer and the landscape passes by you boringly inside a frame. On a motorbike the frame is no longer there. You have complete contact with everything. You are not a spectator, you are in the scene, and the feeling of presence is overwhelming.
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Some scholars argue that the energy needed for a fortnight’s vacation is equivalent to that consumed in two months of work. On the other hand, what is spent in a fortnight’s vacation corresponds to what is earned in two months of work.
Eros Drusiani
Seeing some of my acquaintances in the mountains during the Christmas holidays, memories of the good old days of university come to mind, when I had to work on holidays, always, while many of my classmates went to have fun, in the summer to the seaside, and in the winter to the snow!
Carl William Brown
Vacations have become somewhat of a status symbol and a measuring device of how well we’re keeping up with the Joneses. This is another path that leads directly into the “Artificial Wealth Trap.” While I am a strong advocate of taking time to travel and experience other locales, you must keep in mind that vacations are not long term investments. The strategy here is simple: Do not use your credit cards to finance your travles. You may be living it up in the lap of luxury and relaxation while on vacation but ask yourself how relaxed you will feel when the bills come in.
J. J. Childers
The death of some workers in a car accident seems almost like a dramatic liberation; that of some rich vacationers in a plane crash seems more pleasantly humorous; finally, the death of some devotees on a pilgrimage to Lourdes turns out to be tragically comic.
Carl William Brown
Vacations are seen as an antidote to work. They are medicine, a remedy for counteracting the effects of labor… Vacations allow us to be away from the job, to change the patterns of our day, to alter our routine, to reconfigure our actions and habits, to rediscover ourselves.
Al Gini
There are people who, once they have a job, identify with the company, spend themselves, do their utmost, are always available, study, observe, learn, invent new solutions. And there is another category of people who, while respecting the contract, only do the minimum required. They use all their holidays, all their maternity or sick leave, they stop working at the exact moment their working hours end and they don’t dedicate a single thought to it. They don’t get involved, they don’t study, they don’t innovate. Both, legally, do their duty. But, from the point of view of social life, there is an unbridgeable difference between them.
Francesco Alberoni
Every year, at the beginning of summer, we read learned analyses of staggered holidays, “hit and run” vacations, reasonable departures (intelligent, it seems excessive). Then comes Ferragosto and everything is as usual: people, if they can, don’t stay at home. We bite, yes, but only if they don’t let us escape along crowded highways. It’s not clear whether we are forced (closed offices, shops too), or instead we love the collective ritual and its barbaric aspects: crowds, queues, waiting, suffering and complaints.
Beppe Severgnini
In this vacation we should try to exercise only one human discipline: the sublime art of avoidance. Avoid people, avoid… There are only two things we do not avoid doing. Reading. Reading a lot. Which is ultimately the most comfortable way to travel. And then paying attention. To what happens to us and what has happened to us during the year. To understand. “In life it is not the signs that are missing. What is missing is the code.” Pennac says so and I believe it”.
Luciana Litizzetto
Vacations are your best chance in the year to get in some real living, to get out of the job-as-life box, off automatic pilot, and rediscover your passions, enthusiasms, friends, family, and the vitality of partaking in the world outside career brainlock. Social scientists have found that leisure experiences increase positive mood, act as a buffer against life’s setbacks, and open the door to the best times of our lives.
John De Graaf
Going on vacation is also stressful. Do you know the lines we have to stand in at the airport? They never end, you stand there for hours and hours. A gentleman, finally arriving at the counter after a long time, was asked by the girl behind the counter: «So, where are you going to go?». «With difficulty, I’ve finished my vacation…»
Alessandro Siani
I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.
Robertson Davies
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