My tendency to look at the world through the eyes of the painter whose pictures I have seen last has given me an odd idea. Since our eyes are educated from childhood on by the objects we see around us, a Venetian painter is bound to see the world as a brighter and gayer place than most people see it. We northerners who spend our lives in a drab and, because of the dirt and the dust, an uglier country where even reflected light is subdued, and who have, most of us, to live in cramped rooms - we cannot instinctively develop an eye which looks like such delight at the world.
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Italy, p 47, Penguin 60s Classics] [written on 8 October 1786]
Exactly! Thus, people like living where I live rather than places in the northern hemisphere because of the same brilliance and radiance of light and environment. Makes a difference to the approach to life.
(Also good to know that there is no thought that I can think that has not already been thought hundreds of years before by someone smarter and more eloquent!)
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