People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron… If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory
Heterogenous Spectacles
Self Portrait
the heart of the world
Wanderlust / Adventure on the way to the top of Mount Whitney on the Mountaineers Route.
As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.
John Muir
Beach Debris
Wanderlust in Big Sur among the beach debris…
…it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.
John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
Parrot Cay, Bahamas
Wanderlust on Parrot Cay, Bahamas
It was the kind of town that made you feel like Humphrey Bogart: you came in on a bumpy little plane, and, for some mysterious reason, got a private room with balcony overlooking the town and the harbor; then you sat there and drank until something happened.”
The Rum Diary
Chalk Face
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934
unlike any land known about
Wanderlust along the Burma Road…
This is Burma and it is
unlike any land known about
Rudyard Kipling
a load of memories
Wanderlust in Myanmar: “a load of memories” in a small village near the border with China…
We walk about under a load of memories which we long to share and
somehow never can.
Burmese Days
tossed in all directions
Wanderlust in Myanmar: Flying Elephants.
Gentlemen,” returned Mr. Micawber, “do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants- I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.
David Copperfield
Myanmar Bridge
Wanderlust over a collapsing and swaying Myanmar bridge…
So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Flying Tuna
Wanderlust in Tokyo: a flying tuna in the Tsukiji Fish Market…
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard, 1843
築地市場
Tsukiji Fish Market (Tokyo Fish Market)
Italia
Italy, all the same, had spoiled a great many people; he was even fatuous enough to believe at times that he himself might have been a better man if he had spent less of his life there.
to drink wine and to be beautiful
Wanderlust: Maritima Coast, Italy
They travelled for thirteen hours down-hill, whilst the streams broadened and the mountains shrank, and the vegetation changed, and the people ceased being ugly and drinking beer, and began instead to drink wine and to be beautiful.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Solipsim in a vineyard, Provence France
Wanderlust: Solipsim in a vineyard
Part of me suspects that I’m a loser
and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.
John Lennon
Lavender Field, France
Wanderlust outside Avignon in Provence: a lavender field, France.
To make a perfume,
take some rose water and wash your hands in it,
then take a lavender flower and rub it with your palms,
and you will achieve the desired effect
Leonardo da Vinci