Some travel notes
September 29th 2006 02:45
* The main reason to take photos is to show them to others. Most of your life you’re too busy with life to look twice at old albums.
And if it’s not significant enough to remember, maybe it’s not significant.
Barthes notes that, undistracted, one sees more truly in memory, realizes what is important. He was the only one among his friends who didn’t have any remembrances of childhood, because he had the photos.
* Gone for six weeks -- you’ll definitely get a funny feeling on your return. Funny feeling like what? That all that has happened when away has never been, as if you’d been to fairyland and back? Or as if the real world is the dream, unreal, something you thought you’d left behind?
In “Labyrinth”, Jennifer Connolly steps from the junkyard into her bedroom, and it is suddenly as if she’s never left (and then the junk lady comes in).
I wonder if such feelings can be expressed in terms of belief, or if they reveal something about the nature of belief. On the one hand, you have human adaptability. You quickly adapt to separation from your old life, and to this new one. But on the other hand there is your body’s belief that the separation is real, that the new circumstances are real -- and, on your return, perhaps it is the violation of this belief that is the sense of dislocation, unreality, strangeness.
* How to travel? There are many ways. My London might be tourist attractions and shopping centres -- that might be my experience of London, all that London is to me. Whereas, a Londoner might go their whole lives barely having visited the landmarks.
Where to find the real London?
Why bother looking for it?
And if it’s not significant enough to remember, maybe it’s not significant.
Barthes notes that, undistracted, one sees more truly in memory, realizes what is important. He was the only one among his friends who didn’t have any remembrances of childhood, because he had the photos.
* Gone for six weeks -- you’ll definitely get a funny feeling on your return. Funny feeling like what? That all that has happened when away has never been, as if you’d been to fairyland and back? Or as if the real world is the dream, unreal, something you thought you’d left behind?
In “Labyrinth”, Jennifer Connolly steps from the junkyard into her bedroom, and it is suddenly as if she’s never left (and then the junk lady comes in).
I wonder if such feelings can be expressed in terms of belief, or if they reveal something about the nature of belief. On the one hand, you have human adaptability. You quickly adapt to separation from your old life, and to this new one. But on the other hand there is your body’s belief that the separation is real, that the new circumstances are real -- and, on your return, perhaps it is the violation of this belief that is the sense of dislocation, unreality, strangeness.
* How to travel? There are many ways. My London might be tourist attractions and shopping centres -- that might be my experience of London, all that London is to me. Whereas, a Londoner might go their whole lives barely having visited the landmarks.
Where to find the real London?
Why bother looking for it?
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