For all my love of coziness, homey simplicities, the friend on the phone, the cat crying at the door, good coffee and my own bed, travel lures me like a preacher to the promised land.
Foreign countries and climates, uncertain destinations, the crowded train, the empty city at two a.m. are springboards to altered time and space, to the self stripped to barest essentials, good manners finally meaning, merely, tolerance for the unknown.
When I returned from a 99-day trek through Europe in 1974, I felt unhinged from an American past, politics, from a territorial boundary of “us” and “them,” from a fear of foreign philosophies. I came home ready to go again but my inner itinerary whispered no, not again, for a long time.
