And if and when, having comprehended that the _rôle_ of observer is not
passive but active, we determine by an effort to rouse ourselves from
the coma and really to see the spectacle of the world (a spectacle
surpassing circuses and even street accidents in sustained dramatic
interest), we shall discover, slowly in the course of time, that the act
of seeing, which seems so easy, is not so easy as it seems. Let a man
resolve: "I will keep my eyes open on the way to the office of a
morning," and the probability if that for many mornings he will see
naught that is not trivial, and that his system of perspective will be
absurdly distorted. The unusual, the unaccustomed, will infallibly
attract him, to the exclusion of what is fundamental and universal.
Travel makes observers of us all, but the things which as travellers we
observe generally show how unskilled we are in the new activity.

A man went to Paris for the first time, and observed right off that the
carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like a tramcar. He
was so thrilled by the remarkable discovery that he observed almost
nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his
perspective. He returned home and announced that Paris was a place where
people rode on the tops of trains. A Frenchwoman came to London for the
first time--and no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which
vanquished all others in her mind on the opening day. She saw a cat
walking across a street. The vision excited her. For in Paris cats do
not roam in thoroughfares, because there are practically no houses with
gardens or "areas"; the flat system is unfavourable to the enlargement
of cats. I remember once, in the days when observation had first
presented itself to me as a beautiful pastime, getting up very early and
making the circuit of inner London before summer dawn in quest of
interesting material. And the one note I gathered was that the ground in
front of the all-night coffee-stalls was white with egg-shells! What I