Читать книгу On Anything онлайн

31 страница из 38

Now consider that example—and it will not be difficult to discover how and why these places remain, or rather increasingly become, isolated from the modern world. For what must you do to obtain a view of what I have spoken? You must abandon the express, with its speed and luxury, to which you are accustomed; you must get into a little slow and dingy local train, you must climb a high hill in spite of weather. You may do it once from curiosity, but you are not compelled to the open air and the road as were your fathers, and for one man that will rarely be at the pains to go about to visit and to understand the world there are a thousand who would rather delude themselves into a simulacrum of the emotions of travel by reading of them in some book, and that book will probably have been written by some one who has no more followed the road than themselves. For a man to know the world he must not sleep now and again in the open, or now and again for a freak in some dirty inn where there is bad cooking and bad wine; he must so sleep continually day after day. He must not have only an object before him in his journey, such as the visiting of a famous shrine; he must also have an object all the way along, to note whatever he may pass; and he must so draw his itinerary that it shall be something out of the common, that is, something exposing one always to discomfort and often to peril. There are few men who care to pay the price, and, after all, the effect of their hesitation is excellent, for they run off to vulgarise the New World and the Far East, and they leave England and Europe to the intimacy of those who love them best.

Правообладателям