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Kindle Notes & Highlights
human nature. Some, like the long, empty beaches
The destination we find ourselves drawn to reflects an underlying sense of what is currently missing or under-supported in our lives.
We are seeking, through our travels, not just to see new places, but also to become fuller, more complete beings.
The place we go to should, ideally, help to teach us certain lessons that we know we need to hear. Our destinations are a guide to, and a goad for, who we are trying to become.
We need to ask ourselves what is missing or presently too weak within us, and on that basis, set about identifying a location somewhere on the planet – in the wilderness or a city, in the tropics or by a glacier – with the power to help us develop into the sort of people we need to become.
The exotic is evidence of what is missing in ourselves.
what would be truly exotic for him would be to go and spend two weeks investigating steel mills, cotton factories and coal mines.
the more satisfied and rested we are, the more strength we have to bring to bear on the troubles of others. Being personally happy generates the best possible basis for helping to alleviate the griefs of strangers and friends.
A huge motive for travelling is the search for calm.
we are the descendants of the great worriers of the species (the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals)
We should be more careful when heading for destinations that we imagine will spare us every anxiety. We can go, but with a little more scepticism about our likely mood. It is rare to be uncomplicatedly happy for longer than fifteen minutes.
a pleasure may look very minor – eating a fig, saying a word in a new language, browsing in a spice shop – and yet be anything but.
there is a great deal more that is lovely and interesting in the world than we have yet been encouraged to suspect.
deep within us, we know we are essentially made for sunny mornings, hot lazy afternoons and warm nights that echo to the sound of cicadas.
We can feel our character changing in the sun: becoming something we like a lot more.
When we can have so much pleasure from sitting in a T-shirt and shorts and feasting on a feta and tomato salad, competing wildly for promotion loses its point.
Whenever something feels alien or in any way threatening, your instinct has been to retreat, and you’ve missed out on a lot.
Our journeys can teach us a vital skill: that of not minding so much if we occasionally look a fool.
They may be the best conduits for developing into the more confident, less self-conscious people we crave to be.
We should want to keep in mind everything we’ve learnt of alternative realities, as we have seen them in Tunis or Hyderabad, Lima or St Gallen.
We should never forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Valletta and Luoyang, that this is only one of many possible worlds.
We see the broader outlines of their lives. We’d like to tell them in franker, more direct terms how fond we are of them.
The physical world – against which our ancestors struggled – has been tamed; our little tube of alloy and glass slips calmly over the forests, deserts and oceans that thwarted and terrified them.
The majority of our days are spent on ugly streets. Ever since the development of concrete, steel and plastic, monstrosities have become the norm. Most of our cities are furiously ugly.
we crave architectural and civic beauty, because we intuitively appreciate how much we are at the mercy of our architectural environments.
We know we aren’t the same people wherever we go.
It is maddening how vulnerable we are to the coded messages that emanate from buildings. In the best cities, the streets whisper of hope, dignity, community and friendship. They invite us to become the noblest versions of ourselves.
no politician who announced an intention to make the built environment more beautiful would prosper – or even be deemed sane.
In utopia, architecture would more fairly be interpreted as a branch of mental health, with a crucial role to play in public contentment.
What we can feel at such moments is a basic pleasure at encountering ‘otherness’: practices, customs, habits and vocabularies that are strikingly at odds with those we know from home and which give us a welcome reminder of the sheer diversity and complexity of the world.
for all the talk of globalisation, places retain a fascinating, welcome distinctiveness.
By some unseen, undiscussed but all-powerful rule, tourism tends to separate us from the inhabitants of the countries we’ve come to visit.
the real focus is always elsewhere, on the culture and the monuments, the natural spectacles and the food.
Most of the places we want to travel to are associated with a distinctive way of being: an implicit personality.
In the travel industry of the future, we’ll regard booking a local friend as no different from booking a hotel room or a flight: just another essential, normal part of organising a successful trip.
The tourist industry spends a lot of time assuring us that the more money we spend, the happier we will be.
The slightest psychological disturbance can destroy the benefits of a multi-billion-dollar hotel and chauffeured automobile.
it lies in the capacity of a trip to cement the bonds of affection between family members;
discomforts feel like an interruption of the real point of the trip. Only later do we realise that they are what helped us to get to know one another properly
Almost all of us are, when we travel, in search of this ideal establishment: the little restaurant.
If we were cannier about our pleasures, we’d ensure that we spent more time chatting with people and less time in museums;
we’re collectively still at the dawn of knowing how to make ourselves properly happy.
All the very interesting and attractive places get busy. The desire to journey away from the crowd simply leads us to a desperate scramble for ever more remote locations:
They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want. They implicitly mock our self-importance and self-absorption and so return us to a fairer, more modest sense of our role on the planet.
Our encounter with nature calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes has any relevance to it.
Drawing Rather than Taking Photographs
Before the invention of photography, people used to draw far more than they do today.
drawing can teach us to see: to notice properly rather than gaze absentmindedly.
In the process of recreating with our own hand what lies before our eyes, we naturally move from a position of observing beauty in a loose way to one where we acquire a deep understanding of its parts.
The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.
