it is easy to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places.At home, as my eyes had panned over the photographs of the travel destination, there were no reminders that those eyes were intimately tied to a body and mind which would travel with me wherever I went and that might assert their presence in ways that would threaten or even negate the purpose of what the eyes had come to see.....My mind and body were were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination.

Actual experience where what we have come to see is always diluted in what we could see anywhere, where we are drawn away from the present by an anxious future and where our appreciation of aesthetic elements remains at the mercy of perplexing physical and psychological demands.

alain de botton