Memo_The Art of Travel

De Botton A. The art of travel[M]. Vintage, 2008.
大學兩年，大江南北也算走了些路，而我不再對旅行抱有極為熱切的期待，多少在這篇文章中述之殆盡。
正如文章所言，旅行的樂趣往往不在於旅途的情景，而在於旅途中關聯了自身生活經驗的敏感。漫無目的的閒逛、獨身一人的旅行，都會喚起被我們壓抑已久的敏感。
各地於我似乎已然頗為乏味，在臺百日有餘，心中所思的或許是日後有機會，在歐美或會再有些文化衝擊產生的敏感，而亞太地區大概不會再有強烈的觸動。而文章於我的意義也即在此，它提醒我保持對生活經驗的敏感，對旅行與周遭事物的敏感；當我重新審視這個世界，它並不是單調乏味的，而事實上正相反，它不引人注目的細節中，飽含著在地文化的精粹，亦重新喚起了作為個體對於未知的憧憬。

或許壓抑已久的面具戴的習慣，而心中的波動也會偽裝，由此多少也想起了局外的邊緣人Mills，永遠保持可以隨時遊走在熟悉之外的能力，冷眼而又熱切地審視我們的生命。而進一步講，保持對過程的敏感而不再專注於終點，也是一種人生態度的選擇。我高中時很喜歡錢镠的“陌上花開，可緩緩歸矣。”我是讚成這種生命態度的，而世俗往往讓我們別無選擇，最終在奔赴在生計間，面具也再難摘下。
De Maistre在19世紀穿著粉色睡袍重新審視著他的生命，大抵這種保持敏感的生活方式，亦將重新賦予我們生活的樂趣。想起《the road not taken》:
Two roads diverged in a wood,and I﹣
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

IX On Habit

“The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room’—Pascal, Pensées, 136.”

“I advise any man who can do so to get himself pink and white bedlinen,’ he writes, for these are colours to induce calm and pleasant reveries in the fragile sleeper.”

粉紅色睡袍的出處，頗為有趣，或許我會嘗試。

’“the notion that the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mind-set to our own locales, we might find these places becoming no less interesting than, say, the high mountain passes and butterfly-filled jungles of Humboldt’s South America.”

“We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be unremarkable 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 a hairdresser’s shop unusually fascinating. We dwell at length on the layout of a menu or the clothes of the presenters on the evening news. We are alive to the layers of history beneath the present and take notes and photographs.”

這段話讓我想起15年初在拉薩時的感慨，似乎站在八廓街上，透過擁擠的人群，我能看到彼時雪域王朝的興衰落寞。

“Home, by contrast, finds us more settled in our expectations. We feel assured that we have discovered everything interesting about our neighbourhood, primarily by virtue of our having lived there a long time…We have become habituated and therefore blind to it.”

“How few people are right now taking delight in this sublime spectacle that the sky lays on uselessly for dozing humanity! What would it cost those who are out for a walk or crowding out of the theatre to look up for a moment and admire the brilliant constellations that gleam above their heads?”（﹣De Maistre）

我時常覺得自然是最為廉價的奢侈品，而吾與子之所共適。

“They had fallen into the habit of considering their universe to be boring—and their universe had duly fallen into line with their expectations.”

這段頗合我的心境，旅行似乎也是乏味無聊。

“ It felt peculiar to be outside in the middle of the day with no particular destination in mind.”

漫無目的。

“Information that assisted me in my goal attracted my attention; all else was judged irrelevant. Thus, while I was sensitive to the number of people on the pavement, as potential impediments to my path, their faces and expressions were invisible to me—as invisible as the shapes of the buildings or the activity in the shops.”

“A bus that we might at first have viewed aesthetically or mechanically—or even used as a springboard to thoughts about communities within cities—becomes simply a box to move us as rapidly as possible across an area that might as well not exist, so unconnected is it to our primary goal, outside of which all is darkness, all is invisible.”

這裡頗契合社會學的想象力。

“My walks along the street had been excised of any attentive-ness to beauty, any associative thoughts, any sense of wonder or gratitude, any philosophical digressions sparked by visual elements. In their place, there was simply an insistent call to reach the Underground posthaste.”

“I thought of the similarities of complaints—always selfishness, always blindness—and the old psychological truth that what we complain of in others, others will complain of in us.”

“Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. They may have particular visions of who we are and hence may subtly prevent certain sides of us from emerging: ‘I hadn’t thought of you as someone who was interested in flyovers,’ they may intimidatingly suggest. Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity. ”

我們時常被他人所困。

“Alexander von Humboldt specified his motive for travelling: ‘I was spurred on by an uncertain longing to be transported from a boring daily life to a marvellous world.”

這與我剛入大學的心情極為一致。

“When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences—their insignificant, everyday experiences—so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others—and how many there are!—are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much.”(-Nietzsche)

尼采的cork比喻真實形象。

“There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”