Explore "On no Book and its Advantages as a Companion to Travel" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I know very well that there are men going about who will pretend that when a thing is not there it may be neglected, and that existence is the only thing that counts, but these are ignorant and common men who have not read the philosophers of North Germany, and in particular the divine Hegel. For to us who live upon the summit of human thought it is manifest that there is no such thing as nothing, and that the absence of a thing or the nonexistence of a thing is but another aspect of its presence or its existence. So Bergmann (I translate him into Latin, for German is a difficult tongue) "_esse antequam non esse esse satis constat_. " So also Biggs, his greatest living pupil at Oxford, "The moment we grant potentiality to entity -- -- " Hold!
What I am driving at, good people, is that a man who takes no book upon a holiday forms very worthily one of the series of men who do, and I will confess that this No Book is the book I invariably take with me, in every distant journey which those who meet me upon them may think holidays, but which I myself have always considered to be occupation and life.