The Tourist and the Pilgrim
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The Tourist and the Pilgrim
When the traveler wants a big experience, he goes to a big city to see big things. But when he wants an “ authentic” experience, he must eschew the most well-trodden places, possibly the cities themselves, to find it. He must seek out places that have not yet been touched by “tourism”, he must find the people and places that still have remoteness —... See more
Simon Sarris • Small Spaces
Furthermore, the growth of an acute sense of the past and the future gives us a correspondingly dim sense of the present. In other words, we seem to reach a point where the advantages of being conscious are outweighed by its disadvantages, where extreme sensitivity makes us unadaptable. Under these circumstances we feel in conflict with our own bod
... See moreAlan W Watts • Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Even today many travellers leave home not just to see new places, but also to see the whole of the place they have left from the various kinds of distance – cultural, physical, linguistic – that travel opens for them. Indeed, a fascination with this perspective is something I associate with the most experienced travellers.
Mark Vanhoenacker • Skyfaring
“Where is this?,” implying another question: How can I get there, too? A certain ambivalence has always been a part of travel, knowing you’re a tourist but also craving direct contact with a different place. Yet algorithmic recommendations have automated that process of word of mouth and turned tourism into a conveyor belt that intrudes much deeper
... See moreKyle Chayka • Filterworld
Time is primarily linear, disjointed and fragmented. All of your past days have disappeared; they have vanished. The future has not come to you yet. All you have is the little stepping-stone of the present moment. When the soul leaves the body, it is no longer under
John O'Donohue • Anam Cara: 25th Anniversary Edition
The modern mind—so enthralled by technique, so oriented to efficient production and “bottom-line” results, so obsessed with comfort and predictability—approaches the concept of pilgrimage with wariness and puzzlement. Why backtrack and sidestep when you can march straight ahead? The word vicissitudes, with its promise of ups and downs, its suggesti
... See moreErnest Kurtz • The Spirituality of Imperfection
We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame... See more
M. E. Rothwell • All Hail the Cloud
There is often something deeper below the surface motivating many of us to strive to uncover something more about ourselves and the nature of this world when we travel. But do we necessarily need to go looking for it “out there” beyond the horizon? Why might strolling the streets of Paris on a fall moonlit night enchant us in a way our midwestern t... See more