"Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it"
About this Quote
Wideness, in Ella Maillart's hands, isn't scenery; it's a discipline. The line is shaped like a koan, but its target is practical: you don't get the world by merely moving through it. You get it by training the mind to hold it. "Only when" sets a gatekeeping tone that feels deliberately austere, almost anti-touristic. Maillart is pushing back against the easy romance of escape, the idea that distance automatically delivers perspective. The real journey, she suggests, is cognitive.
The key verb is "grasp". It's physical, even greedy, yet she pairs it with something famously ungraspable: wideness. That contradiction is the point. Wideness can't be collected like souvenirs or pinned to a map; it has to be apprehended as a mode of attention. Once you can "grasp" it, you can "possess" it - but possession here reads less like ownership and more like integration. The world becomes yours only insofar as it becomes part of how you think and perceive.
Context matters: Maillart was a Swiss travel writer whose life threaded through expeditions and borderlands, and her era made geography feel newly consequential - politically, spiritually, existentially. Against that backdrop, "wideness" is also an ethical warning. If you can't expand your inner capacity, the outer world remains a postcard: consumed, not understood. The subtext is bracingly modern: mobility is not enlightenment. Without the mental wideness to match it, travel becomes just another form of self-enclosure.
The key verb is "grasp". It's physical, even greedy, yet she pairs it with something famously ungraspable: wideness. That contradiction is the point. Wideness can't be collected like souvenirs or pinned to a map; it has to be apprehended as a mode of attention. Once you can "grasp" it, you can "possess" it - but possession here reads less like ownership and more like integration. The world becomes yours only insofar as it becomes part of how you think and perceive.
Context matters: Maillart was a Swiss travel writer whose life threaded through expeditions and borderlands, and her era made geography feel newly consequential - politically, spiritually, existentially. Against that backdrop, "wideness" is also an ethical warning. If you can't expand your inner capacity, the outer world remains a postcard: consumed, not understood. The subtext is bracingly modern: mobility is not enlightenment. Without the mental wideness to match it, travel becomes just another form of self-enclosure.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Ella
Add to List
