Another thing we can do in our own rooms is to return to travels we have already taken. This is not a fashionable idea. Most of the time, we are given powerful encouragement to engineer new kinds of travel experiences. The idea of making a big deal of revisiting a journey in memory sounds a little strange – or simply sad. This is an enormous pity. We are hugely careless curators of our own pasts. We push the important scenes that have happened to us at the back of the cupboard of our minds and don’t particularly expect to see them ever again.
~ The Book of Life ~ On Confinement
A very important point!
Thank you, Timi. I’ve been revisiting my journeys to Norway and Ireland in memory often these days. 🙂
I’d love to go to both places, as well as Iceland. Luckily for me, I’m a great armchair traveler. And since I’ve made two detailed plans to go to Iceland, I have some ‘virtual’ memories of it. 🙂 Did you get to the Lofoten Islands in Norway? I’d love to go there, and have been there in my imagination. 😉
After I started reading your blog I started wanting to travel to Iceland, too. 🙂 Unfortunately, because of my health problems, I think my traveling days are over. I didn’t get to the Lofoten Islands. 🙁 But like you, I’ve been there in my dreams. There, and on a musk ox safari. So much natural beauty up north there!
Yes, imagination, fueled by books and the Internet, can take us many places where our physical bodies may no longer go. <3
Yes!
One of the things I love about this blog is how how posts often help me think about things in new ways. I love the line in the quote about we often are “hugely careless curators of our own past,” and the concept of revisiting a journey in memory.
Thank you, Sheryl! I love sharing quotes that inspire me and am always pleased when they resonate with others, too. You serve as a careful ‘curator of the past’ on your blog, you know. I so enjoy reading about domestic life 100 years ago and enjoyed also the past posts from your grandmother’s diary.
I love this. It’s so interesting the ways in which we’re using our imaginations now whether it’s to revisit old travels, cook, or connect with each other. 🙂
So happy you enjoyed this, Robin. 🙂 It’s a whole new world for us to explore. Thanks so much for stopping by.