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Johnathan Lim _ohnathan_im — "If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination." (13) "As I lay awake in bed on my first Caribbean night, thinking back over my journey (there were crickets and shufflings in the bushes outside), already the confusion of the present moment was receding, and certain events had begun to assume prominence, for memory is in this respect similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection." (15) "It seems that unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, our actual happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon: an interval in which we achieve receptivity to the world around us, in which positive thoughts of past and future coagulate and anxieties are allayed. The condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes. New patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like the weather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coasts of Ireland. The past victory ceases to seem so impressive, the future acquires complications and the beautiful view becomes as invisible as anything which is always around." (21) "The collective loneliness brought to mind certain canvases by Edward Hopper, which, despite the bleakness they depict, are not themselves bleak to look at by rather allow the viewer to witness an echo of his or her own grief and thereby to feel less personally persecuted and beset by it." (47) "To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be." (75) "Travel twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic, as superficial as if a university course were to prescribe books according to their size rather than subject matter." (122) "He invited his readers to abandon their usual perspectives and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with." (147) "There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing." (159) "We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as being worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but random association has turned us against them." (182) "And insofar as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to." (183) "As Nietzsche knew, reality itself is infinite and can never be wholly represented in art." (200) "Technology may make it easier to reach beauty, but it does not simplify the process of possessing or appreciating it." (219) "Pascal: 'The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.'" (239) "I thought of the multiplicity of lives going on at the same time at different levels in a city. I thought of the similarities of complaints - always selfishness, always blindness - and the old psychological truth that what we complain of in others, others will complain of in us." (247)