To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.
Interpretation
Losing a notebook is seen as a greater loss than losing a passport, highlighting the value of personal thoughts and creativity.
In this quote, Bruce Chatwin emphasizes the importance of personal expression and the unique thoughts and ideas contained within a notebook. While a passport represents external validation and mobility, a notebook holds intimate reflections and creativity, making its loss devastating for a writer or thinker, symbolizing a profound loss of one's inner world.
In practice
When giving a speech about the importance of creative expression, this quote could highlight how personal writings matter most.
The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crespina D. Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeta Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R's - told a story of exile, desolation, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the "things" of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. "We give our children guns and computer games," Wendy said. "They gave their children the land."
When people start talking of man's inhumanity to man it means they haven't actually walked far enough.
Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians-- with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds-- project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.
I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.
What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
Never delay kissing a pretty girl or opening a bottle of whiskey
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
So many amongst us live in the past rather than loving the present and building a brilliant future. Some people stay stuck for years over something they did or a failure they've experienced. Sad. A life is a terrible thing to waste.
I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
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