Above Bored
Cruise literature from David Foster Wallace, P. J. O’Rourke, Lauren Oyler, and David William Bone
Since the early days of large-scale maritime touristic travel, Harper’s Magazine has dispatched intrepid reporters on all-expenses-paid vacations to exotic ports of call. By and large, they had a miserable time. This edition of the From The Archive Newsletter reviews Harper’s tradition of writing on the nearly lethal comforts of cruise life and American decadence, including: David Foster Wallace on the moral ugliness of luxury; P. J. O’Rourke’s satirical story of a U.S.S.R. peace cruise; Lauren Oyler on the Goop At Sea cruise; and David William Bone’s 1936 essay from a Hudson River cruise. To read these articles and gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe to Harper’s Magazine today.
Shipping Out
In his classic 1993 essay, David Foster Wallace reports on the sinister side of luxury from the megaship Zenith.
“Here’s the thing,” he writes, “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 stew of death and decay.”
Fellow Travelers
The narrator in P. J. O’Rourke’s 1982 story, a registered Republican who harbors a soft spot for the “old-time Left,” embarks on a cruise through the U.S.S.R., where he observes the humorous contradictions among aging American progressives.
“I never did get it, what this trip was all about. I stood at the rail of the cruise ship Aleksandr Pushkin staring out at the vast rolling shore of the Volga. Here or there was a patch of grain, not high enough even in late July to conceal the line of furrows plowed straight downhill in the most erosion-producing way possible. And here or there was a skinny cow in an untidy hectare of pasture. But most of the land looked empty, unsown, ungrazed, uncultivated. And all around me were minds just as fallow.”
I Really Didn’t Want to Go
On the Goop cruise
By Lauren Oyler
In 2023, Lauren Oyler wrote about the decadence and depravity of wellness culture as seen on Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop Cruise.
“Last summer, I got an email from my editor asking, sneakily, among the how are you’s, ‘Have you ever thought about writing on wellness??’ She was looking for someone to go on ‘the Goop cruise.’ Like most female writers, I had thought about writing on wellness, mainly in terms of the free stuff I could get to do so. And for name recognition and potential hate-read appeal, a Goop assignment is the ne plus ultra of wellness writing. I don’t know anyone who uses the Goop skin care products, much less reads the graphomaniacal website or attends the ‘In Goop Health’ summits, but I had a hunch that the products, the actual Goop, were nice.”
Paper Hats in the Hudson
David William Bone reports on the “amazing cruising vogue” of the 1930s.
“Have you ever been in a ship anchored in fog in the Hudson River? he asks . . . No, I thought not. A few years ago this would have seemed a none too sensible inquiry, one that only a comparatively small number of people could answer in the affirmative. But it is not quite so senseless now, with this amazing cruising vogue so firmly established and likely long to continue—so many are the sea legs in process of development. Any mystery that there ever was about sea matters has been fairly completely unveiled under warrant of a cruising passage ticket. The traveler, returned, has even learned to use sea terms passably; and on the other hand, the liners’ seamen have been influenced by this new traffic with the land and have actually been heard to say, ‘Okay!’ in acknowledgment of an order.”
