The night in Bangkok is like nowhere else. The smell of mint, of jasmine and perfume as I step outside the airport a little before midnight. Stalls still lining the streets, fragrant with lemongrass and tangerines. Long-legged ladies stepping over streets turned into rivers by the night’s downpour, as dainty as duchesses about to be […]
By eight in the morning, the crowds are already beginning to form, huffing and puffing along the gorgeous strip of coastline that curves around Ipanema’s two miles of beach. Old old men in thongs and bathing trunks, wrinkled women in their two-piece swimsuits, power-walkers jutting their elbows back and forth as they waddle along the […]
To write is to step away from the clamor of the world, to take a deep breath and then, slowly and often with shaking heart, to try to make sense of the bombardment of feelings, impressions, and experiences that every day and lifetime brings. The very act of putting them down—getting them out of the […]
High spirits were rather rampant as I emerged from my morning toiletries that day. There was to be a New Year’s do at the Drones the following week, and I’d come up with the rum idea of asking Bingo Little to put on a foxtrot or two to give the new millennium some bounce. “What […]
You come in over a grey, flat desert that looks like lunar emptiness: the great shrine of the Ayatollah Khomeini as you pull out of the southern suburbs of Tehran, a mosque here and there along the road, and then, for hours on end, nothing but the no-color, arid vacancy. Your mind grows almost numb […]
When I walk out of the little apartment where I live, for much of the year, in Japan, I have to shake myself and tell myself I’m not in southern California. The little lanes are straight, and run between two-storey Western houses with two-car garages and name-plates on their front walls to commemorate their owners. […]
To live in Japan without eating Japanese food seems an advanced kind of heresy. My sushi-loving friends in California regard me as a lost cause; my housemates in Japan simply shrug and see this as ultimate confirmation — me dragging at some lasagna in a plastic box while they gobble down dried fish — that […]
You touch down two and a half miles above the sea, in the world’s highest international airport, and the city below is a bowl of shining light cradled between snowcaps. The cholas, or Indian women, are tromping along in their multicoloured ponchos and bowler hats as if no one had told them that this was […]
There is a square in Mexico, just across the border, where a foreigner is sitting, looking at the bright lights, the big hotels across the bridge. Like everyone in town, he’s also been watching another foreigner–a reflection of himself, we somehow feel–who is, as it happens, a celebrated con man, in flight from his creditors, […]
This is the place where all selves and words burn up, I say defiantly, triumphantly, as I settle into the silent Catholic hermitage where I spend much of my life. Names fall away, and with them all the divisions that names enforce. I look out on an ocean become a blue plate extending below me, […]
