Renunciation is liberation. Not wanting is power.

What can China give me that my soul hasn’t already given me? And if my soul can’t give it to me, how will China give it to me? For it’s with my soul that I’ll see China, if I ever see it. I could go and seek riches in the Orient, but not the riches of the soul, because I am my soul’s riches, and I am where I am, with or without the Orient.

Travel is for those who cannot feel. That’s why travel books are always so unsatisfying as books of experience. They’re worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and if the writer has imagination, he can as easily enchant us with the detailed, photographic description – down to each tiny coloured pennant – of scenes he imagined as he can with the necessarily less detailed description of the scenes he thought he saw. All of us are near-sighted, except on the inside. Only the eyes we use for dreaming truly see.

There are basically only two things in our earthly experience: the universal and the particular. To describe the universal is to describe what is common to all human souls and to all human experience – the broad sky, with day and night occurring in it and by it; the flowing of rivers, all with the same fresh and nunnish water; the vast waving mountains known as oceans, which hold the majesty of height in the secret of their depths; the fields, the seasons, houses, faces, gestures; clothes and smiles; love and wars; gods both finite and infinite; the formless Night, mother of the world’s origin; Fate, the intellectual monster that is everything… Describing these or any other universals, my soul speaks the primitive and divine language, the Adamic tongue that everyone understands. But what splintered, Babelish language would I use to describe the Santa Justa Lift,* the Reims Cathedral, the breeches worn by the Zouaves, or the way Portuguese is pronounced in the province of Trás-os-Montes? These are surface differences, the ground’s unevenness, which we can feel by walking but not by our abstract feeling. What’s universal in the Santa Justa Lift is the mechanical technology that makes life easier. What’s true in the Reims Cathedral is neither Reims nor the Cathedral but the religious splendour of buildings dedicated to understanding the human soul’s depths. What’s eternal in the Zouaves’ breeches is the colourful fiction of clothes, a human language whose social simplicity is, in a certain way, a new nakedness. What’s universal in local accents is the homely tone of voice in those who live spontaneously, the diversity within groups, the multicoloured parade of customs, the differences between peoples, and the immense variety of nations.

Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.