Toby Alexander

Learning ("Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning is young."--Henry Ford)("Education is the best viaticum of old age."--Aristotle), Philanthropy, Business, Music, Writing, Reading, Traveling------ What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country...we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure. There is no pleasure in traveling, and I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. If we understand by culture the exercise of our most intimate sense--that of eternity--then we travel for culture. Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same ways as distraction, in Pascal's use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and graver science, brings us back to ourselves.--Alber Camus. Notebooks 1935-1942 (only 3 continents left)