travels with charley

"There in the quiet . . . [I] could finally come to think about what I had seen and try to arrange some pattern of thought to accommodate the teeming crowds of my seeing and hearing.
"I'll tell you what it was like. Go to the Uffizi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with the numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation. And then when you are alone and remembering, the canvases sort themselves out; some are eliminated by your taste or your limitations, but others stand clear and clean. Then you can go back to look at one thing untroubled by the shouts of the multitude. ... Maybe understanding is possible only after." -p.84

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America