Risks Topics

By hero, we tend to mean a heightened man who, more than other men, possesses qualities of courage, loyalty, resourcefulness, charisma, above all, selflessness. He is an example of right behavior; the sort of man who risks his life to protect his society’s values, sacrificing his personal needs for those of the community. Virgil’s Aeneas is a hero in this sense of the word. He devotes his warrior skills, his pleasures, and finally his life to the historical destiny of founding Rome. Dante climbing to heaven in the Divine Comedy is a hero. Sergeant York risking his life to “end all wars” is a hero.... There is, of course, another sort of heightened man who bulks large in the popular imagination.... He is not “loyal,” not a model of right behavior. Quite the contrary, he fascinates because he undermines the expected order. He possesses the qualities of the “hero”: skill, resourcefulness, courage, intelligence. But he is the opposite of selfless. He is hungry; “heightened,” not as an example, but as a presence, a phenomenon of sheer energy. One thinks of certain sports heroes, who boast and indulge their whims; who cannot be relied on, not because they are treacherous, but because the order of their needs is purely idiosyncratic.
—Paul Zweig, U.S. educator, critic. The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World, ch. 3, Princeton University Press (1974)

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment. ... The explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity. ... If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates. ...
—Paul Fussell (b. 1920)