Today, via emails, reading and the mail, has themed itself "travel." (Even as I sit at my kitchen table and contemplate packing up apartment.) Travel in the BIG/romantic, seeking, calling on the ghosts-of-great-wanderers past, sense.A friend sent the following quote - treasure-able for many reasons, not the least as one more passage about Marco Polo (must be an archive, somewhere).
"Further on comes the desert of Lob: a stony plain, tiers of clay precipices, glassy salt ponds...In this desert are preserved traces of an ancient road along which Marco Polo passed six centuries before I did: its markers are piles of stones. Just as I had heard in a Tibetan gorge that interesting drum-like roar which had frightened our first pilgrims, so in the desert during the sandstorms I also saw and heard the same as Marco Polo:
"the whisper of spirits calling you aside"
and the queer flicker of the air, an endless progression of whirlwinds, caravans and armies of phantoms coming to meet you, thousands of spectral faces in their incorporeal way pressing upon you, through you, and suddenly dispersing.
In the twenties of the fourteenth century when the great explorer was dying, his friends gathered by his bedside and implored him to reject what in his book had seemed incredible to them - to water down its miracles by means of judicious deletions; but he responded that he had not recounted even a half of what he had in fact seen."
V. Nabokov, Dar/The Gift pp. 124, 5.
(Photo's mine, of Gandaki Valley, Nepal)
C - thinking big thoughts, living local
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