Physical places ... shape the attitudes of visitors arriving from distant homelands ... the nature of the visited place affects the very tone of a journal entry. It influences the selection of the facts one chooses to jot down about that place.

... the historian who visits a place writes a different history than the historian who stays at home, satisfied to read about a place someone else once visited

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it--like that between the sparrow and the twig. The difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.

Over the years, one comes to measure a place, too, not just for the beauty it may give, the balminess of its breezes, the insouciance and relaxation it encourages, the sublime pleasures it offers, but for what it teaches. The way in which it alters our perception of the human. It is not so much that you want to return to indifferent or difficult places, but that you want to not forget.