STENDHAL ON THE PROCESS OF TRAVELING.

STENDHAL ON THE PROCESS OF TRAVELING. Annalisa’s e mail about enjoying all of a vacation trip came as I was reading some quotations from Stendhal in Graham Robb’s THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE. Stendhal described at length a trip he took on a steamboat on the Loire. Ten minutes after leaving Tours it was stuck on a sandbar for several hours. Stendhal wrote that he recounted the difficulties of the trip “to encourage the reader to take a cheerful view of ‘all the little mishaps that often spoil the jolliest expeditions–passports, quarantine, accidents.” The traveler should avoid ill humor “‘as a kind of madness that eclipses the objects of interest that may surround one and amongst which one will never pass again.'” Of course, one can extend the thought to the journey of life….