A filmic view of a landscape is not quite the same as a filmic view of a painting. The landscape is always charged with the possibility of usefulness. When you’re looking at a field, someone can always walk across that field. A painting, on the other hand, is settled. It is there to be looked at. It stills the frenzy of the human heart. It declares

For Taylor, to stay in the present (a present that integrates both past and future), we need to see ourselves as pilgrims on a journey. He believes this is a positive way of living in the immanent frame. True discourse and storytelling with others keeps us squarely in an open present, making scope something much different from resource-accruing.

In his book Back to Sanity, the psychologist Steve Taylor recalls watching tourists at the British Museum in London who weren’t really looking at the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian artifact on display in front of them, so much as preparing to look at it later, by recording images and videos of it on their phones. So intently were they focused

And the road doesn’t disappoint: it offers an unending ribbon of sights and stop-offs whose flashing billboards promise exactly what you’re looking for—happiness, satisfaction, joy. Indeed, the road has a strange way of showing what looks like a destination in the distance that, when you get there, points to another destination beyond it.