"for it is strictly incorrect to think of the progressive cultures as materialistic, if the materialist is one who loves concrete materials. no modern city looks as if it were made by people who love material. the truth is rather that progressive man hates material and does everything possible to obliterate its resistances, its spatial and temporal limits. increasingly his world consists of end-points, of destinations and goals with the times and spaces between them eliminated by jet propulsion. consequently there is little material satisfaction in reaching the goal, since a life full of goals or end-points is like trying to abate one's hunger by eating merely the two ends of a banana. the concrete reality of the banana is, on the contrary, all that lies between the two ends, the journey as it were, all that jet propulsion cuts out. furthermore, when the time and space between destinations are cut out, all destinations tend to become ever more similar. the more rapidly we can travel to hawaii or japan or sicily, the more rapidly the resort is, as tourists say, 'spoiled', which means that it is increasingly like los angeles, chicago, or london".
(allan watts, "nature, man and woman")