Having seen different landscapes and encountered strangers of various ethnicities and religions, the book focuses on “nationalism.” In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari elevates humanity’s “ability to imagine” to an extraordinary level, suggesting it is the key distinction between humans and animals. This idea runs throughout this book.
Although I often wanted to criticize the author, Liu Zichao, for merely rehashing information from Wikipedia, it’s still impressive how he managed to convey a subtle sense of emptiness in a travelogue. People are willing to pay unimaginable costs to construct a self-identity from nothing, and this identity is merely a fragment of historical truth, sometimes even distorted to maintain the interests of a few.
Traveling to more places and meeting more people, perhaps we get a little closer to our true selves through the reflection of the outside world. Put on Chen Qi Zhen’s The Meaning of Travel!