Travelling

From Alain on Happiness (1973), Translated by Robert D. and Jane E. Cottrell:

In these vacation months, the world is full of people rushing from one sight to another, obviously hoping to see a great deal in a short time. If it is so they can talk about what they have seen, all well and good, for it is best to be able to mention the names of several places; that is one way of killing time. But if it is for themselves, if they really want to see something, I do not quite understand them. When you see things on the run, they all look alike. A waterfall is still a waterfall. Thus someone who travels around at full speed is hardly richer in memories at the end than at the outset.

The real richness of sights is in their details. Seeing means going over the details, stopping a little at each one, and then taking in the whole once again. I don’t know if other people can do that quickly and then run off to look at something else, and start all over again. As for me, I cannot. Happy are they who live in Rouen and who every day can glance at something beautiful – the old Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Ouen, for example – as if it were a painting in their own home.

However, if you visit a museum only once or stop only briefly in one of the countries on the tourist circuit, it is almost inevitable that your memories become confused and then form a kind of gray picture with indistinct lines.

To my mind, traveling means going a few feet, then stopping and looking to get a different view of the same things. Often, going to sit down a little to the right or to the left changes everything, and a lot more than going a hundred miles.

Going from waterfall to waterfall, I always find the same waterfall. But if I go from rock to rock, the same waterfall changes at every step. And if I return to something I have already seen, it strikes me more than if it were new; and in fact it is new. To avoid getting into a rut, all one has to do is contemplate something rich and varied. It should be added that as one learns to see better, one discovers inexhaustible joys in even the most common sights. Moreover, the sky with its stars can be seen from anywhere; now there is a marvelous precipice.