The Writer and the Wanderer: Quote from Nelson Algren

The Writer and the Wanderer: Quote from Nelson Algren: "The end is nothing.  The road is all."

Quote from Nelson Algren

"The end is nothing.  The road is all."

The Balloon Man of San Miguel

I am sure there's a children's book, waiting to be written about this man.  He is the one in the salmon pants underneath all his balloons.  I never saw his face.  Not sure it was possible.  But I loved watching him wandering up the street and love the girl, looking at his balloons.

Pages from My Journals Over the Years...

 These are just some sample journal pages from my travels to Mexico, Morocco, Vienna, Key West, Turkey.  I have kept these extensive and details journals for years.  It has always been a central part of my process.  I enjoy sharing them. 

Our Real Journey

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
                                                       Wendell Berry










 

Still debating what to do this summer?  Come to Sicily for a week or so.  Taking a writing workshop, sit by the sea, drink Sicilian wines.  Yeah, don't you think?

 www.writebythewater.com

The Territory of Desire

"What a powerful thing to know that one's own desires are mappable on to strangers."  from George Saunders, from a story about traveling to DuBai.  From "The Brainhead Megaphone," I believe.

I love this quote by Saunders.  The idea of making your desires mappable as if we were all sailing into uncharted terrain.  One of the things I want to accomplish in this blog is to share the idea that the journey is the great metaphor for all that we do.  I like the idea that we have an inner geography that can somehow be charted and that we can share that map with others.  As Michael Chabon once said, the shortest difference between two heads is a story.  It is only in reading and sharing that we become porous, semi-permeable, accessible to others. 

People are unknowable but they can become less so in the journey of the mind into reading and in the journeys we take into any mysterious, uncertain terrain.  It is impossible to feel another person's pain, but I don't believe it is impossible to understand their longing.