{quotable thursdays}

{via grey likes weddings}

I came across this quote in one of the readings I gave my class this week for my seminar on cross-cultural encounters in the early modern world. It affected me profoundly. I think  as someone who spent most of her life travelling, it enabled me to understand why I still have an urge to travel. What Calvino so artfully describes here is that moment when you're travelling or when you have returned home and you realise that your travels have profoundly changed you. They've made you realise that your travels do not merely shape the person you will become, but they have an effect on how you see and experience your past.


"...the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
                                        -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

{from Jose Villa photography}

{Ports}