public opinion, the sum of private opinions, does matter, can matter often for good.

One does odd things. You see, when one's young one doesn't feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not “for good”; one thinks everything is a rehearsal - to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

In Europe, where human relations like clothes are supposed to last, one's got to be wearable. In France one has to be interesting, in Italy pleasant, in England one has to fit.

All wealth is relative; and so is its absence.

The future of human society. Had it made an irrevocably false start? The compass error that gets harder to correct with every mile you go?

It would seem that in history it's never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.

A part, a large part, of traveling is an engagement of the ego v. the world. The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.