Lookign at the Photos in NG

"I Want to Be There," I told myself.

When I was looking at the photos on NG, it suddenly came to me, for the first time, that I actually wanted to be there. Much as I hated the notion of "traveling", or as I thought myself to be, at that moment and many a moment since that one, I was dying to be there.

I want to touch the stone railings with my fingertips and let them take away some heat from there; I want to stand on the balcony of an ancient castle and look down on the green villages and woods down below like a king used to do.

Some childhood memories came back to me. How much did I want to occupy a mound for my own, and have my own view there, to feel as if I was the king of the world.

It will not bother me if the place I went is not beautiful or exciting, I just want it to be different from mine, so that I will learn something from it. I want to see it as it is. I want to be steeped in its total facts and truth, and that is the essence of traveling. Not for pleasure, otherwise a computer game will do, but for expansion of the heart and the clarification of the mind.