Evelyn Waugh on the retroactive nature of “adventure”

“When we have been home from abroad for a week or two, and time after time, in answer to our friends’ polite inquiries, we have retold our experiences, letting phrase engender phrase, until we have made quite a good story of it all; when the unusual people we encountered have, in retrospect, become fabulous and fantastic, and all the checks and uncertainties of travel had become very serious dangers; when the minor annoyances assume heroic proportions and have become, at the luncheon-table, barely endurable privations; even before that, when in the later stages of our journey we reread in our diaries the somewhat bald chronicle of the preceding months — how very little attention do we pay, among all these false frights and bogies, to the stark horrors of boredom.”
–Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (1931)