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. […]

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, […]

How to say goodbye to the world with peace ? How accept everything around us, including the fact that “us” itself is something of an illusion, and certainly about to be no longer ? How take leave of things with light ? Those questions have been circling around the later songs of Leonard Cohen, as […]

“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark […]

American travel writing is about looking for the light. Or so, at least, I told myself, rather loftily, as I landed in Atlanta on my first trip to the city, got into a new Aspire and proceeded to drive around the “Phoenix of the South.” I passed Perimeter Point and Perimeter Mall, drove through a […]

Four years ago on New Year’s Day, while contemplating the intricate battle of good and evil depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, I saw two of the Khmer Rouge’s chief killers—Pol Pot’s lieutenants, in effect—walking, unprotected, through the country they had devastated. Having turned themselves in to Cambodian authorities under an amnesty […]

In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires: the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or at the very least, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of […]