The Book of Secrets: Woodcuts Displaying Symbols and Illustrations of Alchemical Processes, France c. 1656 via The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
(via bookporn)
No one likes a tourist.
But no one else wants to pick up the dirty business of looking.
Whenever we arrive somewhere, we look around, we take it all in. First the big picture, the buildings, the sign-boards, the logos, the curb of a street as it vanishes around a corner. Then the details. Then the people. We try to understand.
As we slowly get absorbed into our surroundings, as our time turns into numbers in between black leather covers, so do our surroundings turn into cardboard scenery. As we become part of a place, we stop seeing it, except in those strange hours that are on neither page, on the walk back home with heels dangling from your hand, on the bus stranded in the midsection of a parade.
Is there a surreptitious time, when we grow out of being the tourist, but before we become the gargoyles ourselves, when we truly understand a place?
