He carries ruins to ruins.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays: First Series (1841)

'I have an unfortunate disposition'

“‘Now look here, Maksim Maksimich,’ he [Pechorin] answered, ‘I have an unfortunate disposition: whether it is my upbringing that made me thus or whether God created me so, I don’t know: I only know that if I am a cause of unhappiness for others, I am no less happy myself. Naturally, that is poor comfort for them, nevertheless, this is a fact. In my early youth, from the minute I emerged from under my family’s supervision, I began madly to enjoy every pleasure that money could buy, and, naturally, those pleasures became repulsive to me. Then I ventured out into the grand monde, and, soon, I became likewise fed up with society: I have been in love with fashionable belles, and have been loved, but their love only irritated my imagination and vanity, while my heart remained empty ... I began to read, to study—I got just as sick of studies—I saw that neither fame nor happiness depended on them in the least, since the happiest people are dunces, while fame is a question of luck, and in order to obtain it, you only have to be nimble. Then I began to be bored ... Soon after, I was transferred to the Caucasus: this was the happiest time of my life. I hoped that boredom did not exist among Chechen bullets. In vain! After one month, I got so used to their buzzing and to the nearness of death, that, really, I paid more attention to the mosquitoes, and I was even more bored than before, because I had almost lost my last hope. When I saw Bela in my home, when for the first time I held her in my lap and kissed her black curls, I—fool that I was—imagined she was an angel sent me by compassionate fate ... I was wrong again. The love of a wild girl was little better than that of a lady of rank; the ignorance and the naïveté of one pall on you as much as the coquetry of the other. I still like her, I suppose; I am grateful to her for several rather sweet moments; I am ready to die for her—only I find her company dull. Whether I am a fool or a villain, I don’t know; but of one thing I’m sure, that I also deserve pity, even perhaps more than she. My soul has been impaired by the fashionable world, I have a restless fancy, an insatiable heart; whatever I get is not enough; I become used as easily to sorrow as to delight, and my life becomes more empty day by day; there is only one remedy left for me: to travel. As soon as I can, I shall set out—but not for Europe, God preserve! I shall go to America, to Arabia, to India—perchance I may die somewhere, on the way! At least, I am sure that this last consolation will not soon be exhausted with the help of storms and bad roads.’ He went on like this for a long time, and his words became engraved in my memory because it was the first time that I had heard such things from a man of twenty-five, and I hope to God it may also be the last ... ”

—Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839/rev. 1841) (trans. Vladimir Nabokov w/ Dmitri Nabokov 1958)

The Difference Language Makes

Lonergan starts from the simple and evident fact that infants do not speak whereas adults mostly do. In other words: so long as they do not speak, infants do not live in a world mediated by language. 'Their world is a world of immediacy, of sights and sounds, of tastes and smells, of touching and feeling, of joys and sorrows.' As they learn to speak, they are gradually drawn into a world which 'includes the past and the future as well as the present, the possible and the probable as well as the actual, rights and duties as well as facts'. 'It is a world enriched by travelers' tales, by stories and legends, by literature, philosophy, science, by religion, theology, history'. It is, however, also a world in which 'besides fact there is fiction, besides truth there is error, besides science there is myth, besides honesty there is deceit'.

—Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (2007)

'meditation and water are wedded for ever'

Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1851)

'the ungraspable phantom of life'

Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale (1851)

"tiny scenes of merriment and despair"

At the top of the stairs was a small painting by Brueghel that Leclercq had pointed out earlier. It was one of those winter scenes of gray ice, white snow, and blackened trees all overrun with a stampede of human life, so exquisitely small and yet not one life overlooked, each measured and considered: tiny scenes of merriment and despair, equally ominous and comic when seen as such a distance through the master's telescopic eyes. I stepped closer to study it. In one corner a man was pissing on the wall of a house, while in the window above a coarse, dough-faced woman prepared to empty a pot of water on his head. Some ways off, a man with a hat had fallen through the ice while around him the oblivious skaters continued to enjoy themselves—only one small boy had noticed the accident, and was trying to offer the drowning man the end of his stick. There the scene was frozen: the young boy leaning, the stick offered but not yet taken, the whole scene suddenly tilted toward that dark hole that waited to swallow it.

—Nicole Krauss, Great House (2010)