"The idea of traveling makes me feel physically sick. I’ve already seen everything I’ve never seen. I’ve already seen everything I haven’t yet seen. The tedium of the constantly new, the tedium of discovering, beneath the transitory difference of things and ideas, the perennial sameness of everything, the absolute similarity between a mosque, a temple and a church, the absolute equivalence between a cabin and a castle, the same physical body in a king in all his finery and a naked savage, the eternal concordance of life with itself, the stagnation of everything that lives despite the constant changes to which it is eternally condemned. Landscapes are repetitions. On an ordinary train journey, I divide myself pointlessly and nervously between not looking at the landscape and not looking at the book that would be keeping me amused if I were someone else. Life already gives me a vague sense of nausea, and movement only aggravates that. The only nontedious landscapes and books are landscapes that don’t exist and books I will never read. For me, life is a somnolence that does not affect the brain. I keep that free as a place in which to be sad. Leave traveling to those who don’t exist! Presumably for someone who is nothing, life, like a river, is a simple matter of flowing ever onwards. For those who think and feel, those who are awake, the ghastly experience of sitting on a train, in a car or in a ship lets them neither sleep nor wake. I return from any journey, however short, as if from a sleep full of dreams — in a state of torpid confusion, with all my sensations glued together, drunk on what I have seen. I can’t rest because my soul is sick. I can’t move because there’s something lacking between body and soul; it’s not movement I lack, but the desire to move."