convoyblue's VirtualTourist Home Page

Direct self-observation does not by any means suffice for self-knowledge. We need history, inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow. For even when we wish to go down to the stream of our apparently ownmost, most personal essence, Heraclitus's statement holds true: one does not step twice into the same river.The maxim has by now grown stale; yet it is as nourishing and energizing as ever. So too is the maxim that in order to understand history one must search for the living remnants of historical epochs and do so by traveling, as the venerable Herodotus traveled to sundry nations. . . .
It is quite probable that the last three centuries, in all the hues and refracted colors of their civilization, live on, quite close to us: they only have to be discovered. . . . Most assuredly, in remote places, in rarely penetrated mountain valleys, self-contained communities manifesting a much older sensibility can be more readily preserved. That is where we have to go looking for them. . . . Whoever after long practice has become a hundred-eyed Argos in this art of traveling will finally rejoin his Io?I mean his ego everywhere, and will rediscover the travel-adventure of this transformative and evolving ego in Egypt and Greece, Byzantium and Rome, France and Germany, in the periods of the migratory or the sedentary peoples, in the Renaissance and Reformation, in one's own homeland and abroad, and indeed in the sea, the vegetation, and the mountains." Human, All-Too-Human -F.Nietzsche