When you scramble up the unpaved paths that link guesthouse to teahouse in the exiled Tibetan center of Dharamsala—the spiritual home of Tibet today (and of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama)—you can feel yourself subject to an optical illusion. On many days in the spring and the autumn the sun rises so sharply behind the snowcaps […]

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 […]

I look around me sometimes in the Japanese suburb where I choose to live and all I can see are versions of the most passing surfaces from the America I came here to leave behind. The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no […]

The ironies, of course, begin to multiply as soon as a life comes unraveled: in retrospect, everything seems an augury. One night before, the local TV station had announced that the conditions — 106 degrees heat, gale-force winds and drought-stricken hills — were the best for a fire in 100 years. That day, at lunch, […]