In anticipation

"If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find the same process of simplification or selection at work as in the imagination. Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that a narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and, after a night in its medieval monastery, awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply journey through an afternoon. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out of the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in consciousness...It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where the ticket might be...It continues to rain. At last the train starts to move...A fly lands on the window. And still we might only have reached the end of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'he journeyed through the afternoon'."

--- The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

For the past 90 minutes, I was googling about Lucerne, a place in Central Switzerland where I will be flying to in 72 hours and staying for 9 days. I read about all the tourists spots and all the where-to's and what-to's and must-do's. As "Exploring Lucerne - tourists' tips #149" appeared on my computer screen, the above words by Mr de Botton hit me.