14 February

Today's Proust. Travel. Proust saw that each person is essentially unknowable to other people, they occupy their own unique world which we can only catch glimpses of. He thought the same about travel, each place we are desperate to see is more a projection of ourselves than anything about the place itself. And as in relationships, we accumulate more and more places (or lovers, in relationships) in the desperate hope that this will somehow bring us closer to the essence of other places. It won't, as he says, this mindset makes us never really anywhere, we are always projecting ourselves off to somewhere else, while ignoring the essence of where we are. "Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be."