Sketch as Stretch

I admire his sequencing. Alain de Botton in The Art of Travel provides a lovely set up to his discussion of de Maistre's Travel around My Bedroom (found in the chapter "On Habit" in the section "Return") by in the previous chapter ("On Possessing Beauty") introducing Ruskin's reccomendation to sketch or word-paint in order to implant one's experience of a place into memory. de Botton stresses along with Ruskin that aesthetic attainment is not the point; the practice is.

And, as he had pointed out when presented with a series of misshapen drawings that a group of his pupils had produced on their travels through the English countryside: 'I believe that the sight is a more important thing than the drawing; and I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.'

It's all about paying attention wherever one's steps may lead.

Thus ends a chapter and here ends the last chapter of the book...

There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen

Off to sketch.

And so for day 2256
15.02.2013