“Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little round globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or ro

“Superficially, the world has become small and known. Poor little round globe of earth, the tourists trot round you as easily as they trot round the Bois or round Central Park. There is no mystery left, we’ve seen it, we know all about it. We’ve done the globe, and the globe is done. This is quite true, superficially. On the superficies, horizontally, we’ve been everywhere and done everything, we know all about it. Yet the more we know, superficially, the less we penetrate, vertically. It’s all very well skimming across the surface of the ocean, and saying you know all about the sea. There still remains the terrifying underdeeps, of which we have utterly no experience. The same is true with land travel. We skim along, we get there, we see it all, we’ve done it all. And as a rule, we never once go through the curious film which railroads, ships, motorcars, and hotels [sic] over the surface of the earth. Peking is just the same as New York, with a few different things to look at; rather more Chinese about, etc. Poor creatures that we are, we crave for experience, yet we are like flies that crawl on the pure and transparent mucous-paper in which the world is wrapped so carefully that we can never get at it, though we can see it there all the time as we move about it, apparently in contact, yet actually as far removed as if it were the moon…” D H Lawrence, “New Mexico”, Posthumous Papers, written probably 1925 or 1926