25 August 2008

Travellers

“We (in the sense of human beings) travel and explore the world, carrying with us some ‘background books’. These need not accompany us physically; the point is that we travel with preconceived notions of the world, derived from our cultural tradition. In a curious sense we travel knowing in advance what we are on the verge of discovery, because past reading has told us what we are supposed to discover. In other words, the influence of these background books is such that, irrespective of what travellers discover and see, they will interpret and explain everything in terms of these books.”

– Umberto Eco in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (translated by William Weaver)

2 comments:

gypsy said...

i agree wholeheartedly...

Biswajit said...

Thank you. Hope to write more on this later.