Travelling Part 1

Travelling Part 1

dictation exercise

notebook

Arthur P. Stone

Charles Dickens

deciphered shorthand

travel

The first part of a meditation on the benefits of travel, written in shorthand

Stone, Arthur P.

Dickens, Charles

Free Library of Philadelphia [cdc5890009_11]

1859-1860

Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Please seek further permission from the Free Library to reuse this image.

image/tif

English

Brachygraphy shorthand

cdc5890009_11

Working transcription: I suppose the mere act of travelling [is] not very likely to open a man’s mind or amend and enlarge his spirit if he be conceited and shut up within himself and his own good opinion of himself in the beginning. As it would be of small advantage to a man to live in a house with 10,000 windows if he never looked out of one of them, so a man who goes around the world constantly shut up in his own self-satisfactions and prejudices can get very little out of it. Indeed, it may be said of such people that they cannot see anything for themselves. They are always in their own way. They themselves are the obstacle always interposed between their own mental state and the sub/object. Without reflection and abstraction from self it may be questioned whether any tangible sub/object in the universe is capable of producing a very beneficial effect on the mind. Mount Vesuvio for example is a vast and always changing mass of fire and cinders. There is nothing much more remarkable in that ipso facto than there would be in a gigantic gas works. It is when a man […] himself to consider that an action he beholds in that