The art of travel (7)

«'The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room' [Pascal, Pensées, 136]. (...) Xavier de Maistre undertook a journey around his bedroom, later entitling the account of what he had seen Journey around My Bedroom. (...) De Maitre's work springs from a profound and suggestive insight: that the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more in the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own locales, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than the high mountainm passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt's South America. What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. We approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is interesting. We irritate locals because we stand on traffic islands and in narrow streets and admire what they take to be strange small details. We risk getting run over because we are intrigued by the roof of a government building or an inscription on a wall. We find a supermarket or hairdresser's unusually fascinating.»