I found Botton’s fascination with wide-open deserts odd. I didn’t understand it when he first stated that he had a partial interest to photographs of the American West, particularly noting his interest in “bits of tumbleweed blowing across a wasteland”. In the immediate sentence after, he mentioned that he had booked a flight to Sinai. I was definitely curious as to his intentions to say the least. I stopped after reading that particular bit and didn’t go any further before I deliberated what I believed his intentions to be, as he can be vague enough to make your own ideas as to what he is thinking. I thought perhaps he wanted to find himself or something of the sort but the last thing I would think was what he actually stated his intention to be, which was to feel small. Reasons such as this are why I would fear travelling to a wide-open wasteland and getting lost. He quoted Pascal with,

“When I consider … the small space I occupy, which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of the spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there; there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?”

Then to follow that up he stated that “Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel small, whether by doorman in hotels or by comparison with heroes of great achievement.”

He acknowledges that it is usually unpleasant to feel small as well, citing it as either through your job or through the scope of what is around you.  I understand to some degree now that he may use that same fear as influence. In even large cities, as we have previously studied, a large amount of them are vast, but the scope of them is difficult to truly understand unless on a skyscraper, plane, or on a hilltop.  The vastness is not immediately overwhelming unless you see it in all of it’s glory. Not soon after he goes onto use Van Gogh as an example, citing that one of his inspirations for greatness was that Van Gogh saw that most artists that used France as their subject did not capture all there was to capture. The farmers, the average woman, they ignored the vast and the ordinary.