To feel at home, stay at home.
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy, and more picturesque skins, but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
I am not much an advocate for traveling; and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that you have no task to keep you at home?
Right now I am a passenger on space vehicle Earth zooming about the Sun at sixty thousand miles per hour somewhere in the solar system.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
A route . . . is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
There is a third dimension to traveling: the longing for what is beyond.
Rising early the next morning, Jesus went off to a lonely place in the desert; there, he was absorbed in prayer.
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.
What is more intriguing than a spot on the bathroom floor which, as you sit emptying your bowels, assumes a hundred different forms, figures, shapes? Often I found myself on my knees studying a stain on the floor — studying it to detect all that was hidden at first sight.
A striking building stands before us as an individual every bit as soulful as we are.
The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy, and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral, and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age, I was assured that greater age would calm my fever, and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . . In other words, I don’t improve. In further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.
Well, I learned a lot. . . . You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.
