I’ve always liked this characterization in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!:
“She had three jolly old teeth left in the front of her mouth, and when she grinned she looked very knowing, as if when you found out how to take it, life wasn’t half bad.” (p. 140)
That’s pretty much how I’d like to see things into my old age, and that’s the way I’m starting off my weekend.
Seems the ancient Roman tourist wanted statues and holy sites, but no million-dollar views. On the typical tourist of Imperial Roman times, as he ascends the Acropolis in Greece:
“The view was staggeringly beautiful, too, but the visitor was less inspired by that. Like the mountaintop, it was too grand and imposing, not the kind of sweet scenery he favoured. And since the gods, too, were thought to prefer intimate settings, there was nothing ‘divine’ about sweeping vistas–they just conveyed emptiness.”
— Maxine Feifer, Tourism in History: From Imperial Rome to the Present, 1985, page 18
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