(2 of 3)
The original Latin vacatio—an emptying, a suspension of normal activity, an absence of something—performs a small mystic flip when it encounters Pascal's thought: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." But vacations, in a secular sense, have an ancient history. Inns, restaurants, baths and theaters turned up in the archaeological digs at Herculaneum and Pompeii. For just as long, vacationers have been subdivided into spiritual castes: the enthusiasts who live all the rest of the year waiting for their temporary release, like school children in early June; and the possibly larger tribe that comes home every year from its outings, hurls suitcases into closets and vows never to do it again.
In 1941 the critic George Jean Nathan listed— and dismissed— some arguments behind "the vacation idea." Meet new people? "I have met hundreds upon hundreds of new people [on vacation] and you can have all but maybe six or seven of them for a nickel." Take things easy? "The more leisure you have, the more your cares will recur to you." Fun to just let go for a while? No, says Nathan: You eat too much, drink too much, spend too much. "You do everything, in short, that contributes to a magnificent case of physical, emotional, financial and spiritual katzenjammer." As for vacations with children, it was Nathan's contemporary Robert Benchley who wrote that "traveling with children corresponds roughly to traveling third class in Bulgaria."
Women's magazines every June or July publish chattily dire warnings about the "Vacation Blues." These articles are invariably accurate. One does expect too much from vacations and winds up feeling disappointed and even inadequate, as if one had somehow not lived up to the occasion. One does toss through the supposedly sweet idleness with a lump of Calvinist guilt under the mattress; the jauntily go-get-'em "I need some work to do" does conceal, for all its Freudian banality, some sense of unworthiness: you don't deserve the pleasure of a good vacation.
The real danger of the vacation lies in its capacity to compress all family conflicts into an exquisitely focused drama. At their most triumphantly awful, family vacations can compete with a Long Day's Journey Into Night or anything else O'Neill wrote. People in their normal working lives have jobs, roles, friends and routines to diffuse and absorb emotions. In the theater of a summer house, family issues 20 years buried are liable to come up thrashing like lobsters. The husband gets drunk and insults his visiting brother, who makes a ghastly effort to climb in bed with the au pair. The wife, who discovers that her vacation consists of the same cleaning and cooking that she enjoyed at home, considers swimming to the mainland in the middle of the night, since the ferryboats aren't running. If it is not O'Neill, then it is John Cheever. The creatures who most enjoy themselves may be the 15-year-old girls on the beach who all day squeeze lemon juice on their hair and lazily brush it in to make blond streaks; their faces as they do it are as perfectly empty as certain August afternoons.