Response to week 1
\nThe Art Of Travel (Alain de Botton) <\/p>\n
I was strikingly amazed so far not just by this book\u2019s individuality, but also by the way it resonated with some of my own experiences and questions. \u201cIf it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.\u201d (p.90) This relates so much to traveling and the thoughts im having twards travels, espeacially when I am travelling by myself. I had always found that the reality of travel, when I was actually present to it, had little to do with my expectations of what it would bring, this is why I don\u2019t want to go into a new place with expectaions that may have been influenced by my own culture and thoughts. I want to be able to take something new away from this ecpericenc, as well as come back a new person. We all base our lives on steriotypes ans statisics based on certain actions with in our lives. And I\u2019ve always marveled at how trips are often reduced by so many people to a few \u201ccritical moments\u201d and \u201cphotographic highlights\u201d that as de Botton says, \u201clend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.\u201d For most of us, the ending place, and perhaps a few incidents on the way, are what we most remember; the time it takes to plan for traveling itself is seldom remembered or talked about. People like to represent there travels to ourselves and others almost like the travel books we read. Here is one of the ways the author describes it:
\n\u201cA travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply \u2018journey through an afternoon\u2019. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might he. We look back out at the field, It continues to rain.
\n At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops, A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence \u2018he journeyed through the afternoon.’\u201d And, of course, Botton hasn\u2019t even talked about the many actions that these events happen in our thoughts and emotions, as well as the often dull and heavy sensations they arouse in our bodies. For example, I took a trip to Orange Walk Belize anf throught prosses of this all, I had to save money, in fact at points in planning I was scared and afraid that I wouldn\u2019t have the opertunity, but I kept my head up and continue. Finally it reached the moment where it was time to go, all I could think about was how different everything was going to be compared to Wyoming!! Entering the plain was the most intense thing I had ever experience, I was nervous, excite, and could not stop imagining what everything was going to be like, but at the same time I was actually comparing what it was going to be like in my head to my experiences that I had in Wyoming because that\u2019s all I really new. When I got there I would say I did really feel far away from home, this place felt just as close to home as home did.
\n \u201cWe are all of us, without ever having any say in the matter, scattered at birth by the wind onto various countries, but like Flaubert, we are in adulthood granted the freedom imaginatively to re-create our identity in line with our true allegiances.\u201d (p.98) This quote really hits home for me, why, well I cant help but to think that there is so much truth to living in this one sentence. We as humanity don\u2019t realize that there is so much basic human nature that is happening all around us and all over the world. Things we have in common, growing up, attraction, sounds, love, hate, ect. All these examples live with in every human and culture, so why wouldn\u2019t we be able to bond and understand in some way. I think we all are different but we focus so much on how much we don\u2019t connect with others, that we forget that there are so many other options to bond from. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Response to week 1 The Art Of Travel (Alain de Botton) I was strikingly amazed so far not just by this book’s individuality, but also by the way it resonated with some of my own experiences and questions. “If it… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[],"tags":[99],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}