Today’s TTT is favorite books set in another time, but I read entirely too much historical fiction to want to pore through and pick favorites.

I sat facing a flowering bougainvillea that covered the terrace, a shower
of pink blossoms on the ground next to it. After just a few seconds, I had
the impulse to take pictures with my phone. Hand in pocket, I stopped
myself. Was I even really seeing the flowers? Was I going to take a picture
so that I could look at the flowers later? When we click a photo, don’t we
mentally move on to the next thing? As if we are speed-dating reality, like
constantly swiping left on some dating app? Instead of click and move on,
why not just hang out with whatever strikes us as beautiful, then later,
remember the feeling? So, I kept my phone in my pocket, settled in and just
enjoyed the flowers. (The Mature Flaneur)

This quote stood out to me because it reminds me so much of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be, or his essay in For the Love of Life, where he wrote about the consumer/possessive impulse and how it often leads us to destroy things to own them. His example was actually a plucked flower, which is why it comes to mind with this. Freya India also writes on this a bit in her “You Don’t Need to Document Everything“.