Do you spend a large part of your day skimming through information? I do. I believe that most writing can be successfully skimmed. An exception is the work by Pico Iyer, whose essays I savor. He writes about travel, which he defines as “journeys into whatever we can’t explain, or explain away.” His goal is “to try to carry the reader off, as I had been carried off, into a sense of strangeness, and into the expanded sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings.” Iyer, like Proust, believes travel is not about seeing new sights, but seeing with new eyes.
Pico Iyer, Sun After Dark (New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc.: 2004), p. 8.