The Joy of Writing

This article in today's NYT is all about art, but it made me think all about writing. It's about, essentially, the way we tend to collect digital photos as evidence of places we've seen, without really absorbing the experience of being there. Whereas in the eighteenth century, "Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe … spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint" — by now, "Cameras replaced sketc