I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship — both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion — of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.

Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of “Wild Orchids” (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator — or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo — or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.

But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet — and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).

We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the Internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon — an anti-Federal Express, if you like — in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.

But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import — and export — dreams with tenderness.

By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more — not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes — they help you bring newly appreciative — distant — eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second — and perhaps more important — thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.

Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious — to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves — and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year — or at least 45 hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.

So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me — no one can fix me in my risumi –I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.

This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families — to become better Buddhists — I have to question my own too-ready judgments. “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.

I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.

And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.

We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.

That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.

That whole complex interaction — not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?) — is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.

All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”

At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.

In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And — most crucial of all — the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas — and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.

The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic — the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million — it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)

Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room — through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing — not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.

All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.

In Mary Morris’s “House Arrest,” a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On Page 172, however, we read, “La isla, of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator — a fictional construct (or not)? — confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to be — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul’s recent book, “A Way in the World,” was published as a non-fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, “My Other Life,” were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”

And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”

So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also — Emerson and Thoreau remind us — have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.

And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack’s “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

A few days later, as if by magic, a Black Cat messenger appeared at my door with my salvation in his hands. Eagerly, I began typing all the articles I’d previously handwritten, and before long, thanks to my expertise, the correction tape was all used up. Suddenly, I was helpless (having survived quite happily for years without a typewriter). Fretfully, I called up the company, got some more forms, faxed them back, deposited a further payment at the post office, and waited. Soon a whole box of correction tapes arrived. By then, however, the regular ribbon was worn out.

Again I was at a loss, stranded, with no apparent way to complete the article I’d started. I rang up the poor salesman again, completed more forms, made more trips to the post office, and paced up and down like an expectant father. The problem, of course, lay not in the machine but in me, and I was reminded, firsthand, of how quickly we become the servants of our tools, habit-bound machines ourselves.

The story is as old as the camel and the tent — we’re always possessed by our possessions — but it reminded me forcibly that the less one has, the less one has to worry about (a lesson that having one’s house burn down, and all one’s projects and hopes go up in smoke, ought to teach, but somehow does only on paper). And it brought me back to some of the defining principles of the society all around me, which more or less patented the notion that if you decorate a simple room with a single chrysanthemum, it will concentrate the mind and consecrate the flower. It pulled me back, too, to a simpler time, when small pleasures were big and old sensations new. If some of us feel nostalgic for childhood, for all its limitations, that is mostly because we long for a time when days could be eternities and the mind would be where the body is. In a small way, in Japan, with few belongings, no space, and not much savoir-faire, I’m carried back to that state of quick enjoyment, where phone calls are so occasional that they’re actually welcome and every movie, seen once a month perhaps, seems special.

I dwell, of course, in a kind of parallel universe here, and it takes my girlfriend (who’s away at work most of the day) to explain to me that the frightened, kindly woman at the convenience store is, in fact, the cruel owner’s wife and the lady who sells me croquettes has a daughter at the local junior high school.

One summer evening, after I’d been here for perhaps four years, she offered to take me on a tour of the neighborhood on her motorbike, and suddenly, five minutes from our flat, I was in a sleek, unanticipated world of Big Boy burger joints and Chateau d’Or bistros, with the Hotel Silk Road nearby. In parts, the area looked like Atlanta with subtitles, a random suburb made for those with wheels, and appointed with the look-alike global props of Book Bahn, Sushi Land, and Bottle World. Here was the standard jabberwocky of the convenience universe in the latest International Style — Mr. Pachinko, Taco Donald’s, boys in baseball caps that said WHAT’S NEXT? SEX trooping into Neo-Geo Land.

In parts, though, it was something other, and as we drove, the shopping centers fell away, often, and gave onto open fields, and rice paddies, and farmers working outside straw-thatched houses, in villages still so linked that the news of the community was transmitted to every single house by speaker at seven o’clock each night.

And as the sky turned indigo, and a huge pulsing moon rose above the hills, suddenly we came upon something even stranger: huge transparent modern buildings, complex with tubes and workspaces, like the innards of a laptop, erected in the middle of nowhere. The signs said they were the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, here in the vastness of old green hills, and other tidy notice boards nearby explained, in English and Japanese, that they were the first signs of a whole Kansai Science City, which would one day extend for forty miles in every direction, linking all the areas of western Japan into a Silicon Valley East.

A road sign pointed us to Hi-Touch Research Park, and scale models showed the outlines of an urban corridor that would pulse in our midst like an answering machine blinking with some message from the future.

I had been staying in Nara for half the Heisei Emperor’s reign, and yet had never known that I was in the middle of some cosmic city of the new millennium, and suddenly to come upon these spacecraft was vertiginous, like being lifted up so high that one could see one’s home as a dot on some enormous canvas, fashioned by a meta-Thomas Pynchon. All the driving ranges, all the Family Marts and Tomato gas stations and billboards of Felix the Cat I’d taken to be the things of commuting doctors were, in fact, part of some Techno-City of tomorrow that would, among other things, help to displace the green hills that stirred me so deeply.

We got back on the bike, and drove past rice paddies and village streams and wooden houses huddled against the dusk, then turned a corner, and came upon a sign for PARK-DORI, the quiet street I walked down thrice a day.

The person with whom I shared all these adventures was, of course, a little like the society itself to me, alluring both for the parts I could recognize and for the parts that were beyond my ken; daily, she recalled to me that the point of familiarity is to make one comfortable with mystery. All of us know too well that no place is more foreign than the face asleep by our side, under the distant moon; yet in our modern world, such old truths gain especial force, as more and more of us find ourselves sharing homes: with our own private Japans, half strange and half strangely familiar.

Every couple has its private tongue — that could be said to be the distinguishing sign of being a couple; but, in my case, the setup is even stranger, since I share no public tongue with my partner. Because my Japanese has never been good enough to teach her English, nor her English good enough to teach me Japanese, we can communicate only in a kind of fluent pidgin, with English words thrown into Japanese constructions. It sounds a little like the way the neighborhood looks to me.

What this means, though, is that we’re free, for the most part, from subtexts, and from the shadows and hidden stings that words can carry; I can’t make puns with her, spin ambiguities, or engage in very much verbal subterfuge, and she can’t pore over my words to see what they mean or what they don’t mean, what covert weapons they hide or betray. Speaking across a language gap means speaking less to win than to communicate.

The global village has given more and more of us the chance to move among the foreign, and so to simplify and clarify ourselves in this way; even in the neighborhoods where we were born, often, we find ourselves speaking by gesticulation, or enunciating very slowly, like language tapes, to saleswomen and telephone operators. And living a little bit away from words means living a little bit away from the surfaces they carry: my partner of more than twelve years has little sense of who I am in terms of brand names and labels — what my job means, what my schools connote, who I am on my CV — and I, likewise, can’t confine her to the answers on an application form. Neither of us can read a word the other has written, and so we have to apprehend one another, to a small degree, in some way deeper than the known.

For me, being surrounded by a language I can’t follow means, at the lowest level, that I can sleep while the television’s going full blast (so long as it’s not in English), and am never disturbed by all the chatter outside my window about O.J. or Diana’s death. The one steady companion I’ve had all my life (the English language) is here done up in a foreign garb, of “live house” music clubs and “Viking-style” breakfasts, “pocket bell” beepers and “hammer price” auctions. And living out of a linguistic suitcase, I’m reminded of what I find on every foreign trip, which is that, leaving home, I’m convinced I don’t have all I need; and, within a few days, I feel I have three times more than I require. The extra words (the extra goods) get in the way.

Best of all, in Japan, bringing strange eyes to the things the Japanese take for granted, I can see the places that I might otherwise take for granted (England or India or California) through the marveling eyes of those who take them in from right to left: once I took my girlfriend’s seventy-four-year-old father for the only foreign trip he’d taken since the war, to California. Suddenly, in this incomprehensible space, he was a child again, rolling up his trousers and dodging the Pacific surf, collecting shells to take back home. Everything was new to him — albeit translated into the terms he knew — and before he’d even boarded the plane, he’d emptied a roll of thirty-six exposures. For the duration of the eleven-hour flight, he sat with his hands pressed against the window, peering out into the dark.

Such minglings are more and more the fabric of our mongrel worlds, as more and more of us cross borders in our private lives, or choose to live with foreign cultures in our arms. In Toronto, in Hong Kong, even in the Olympic Village nowadays, I seem to see as many couples dissolving nationalities as other kinds of distinctions, and so bringing to light unimaginable new cultures in which the annihilation of traditional identity is turned to something higher.

In Kyoto once, on my way with my girlfriend to the Holiday Inn, I saw a foreigner, tall and sweet-faced, walking down the street with a Japanese woman in one hand and a Japanese-English dictionary in the other. The hotel itself, along the Kamo River, on a narrow street with the northern hills behind it, is not unlike that couple — all the global properties of the Atlanta-based chain reproduced in a setting that could only be Japan. There is a hundred-lane bowling alley there, a driving range, tennis courts, and a room-service menu in English; but when you go to the hotel swimming pool, you are reminded, by written rules, that it is “restricted to guests with tattoo or under influence of alcohol.”

One day, as we were sitting in the lobby of this hybrid place, an elderly woman looked over at my girlfriend, and then leaned over to talk to her. “Excuse me, can I ask you something?” She was Japanese, it turned out, and it was Sunday morning, and the Wedding Hall and Holiday Hall were filling up around us. “What is it like communicating with a foreigner? Do you have problems with religion, customs, other things? How do you get yourself across?” My partner, used to my propaganda, replied that we probably communicated better than if we had too many words, and were free from at least a few distractions; words tend to be most divisive in a common language.

Satisfied, the woman sat back and surveyed the men all around, patting her bouffant hairdo.

A few minutes later, a trim black American, with a gold stud in his ear, sauntered in with his tall Japanese wife (in knee-high boots and miniskirt) and a baby in a stroller. Seeing my girlfriend, the baby cried, “Mama!”

Perhaps the deepest obligation of any foreigner in a place he loves that’s not his own is to remember, daily, that his paradise is a fallen one, if only because it is an everyday reality to those around him, and offers conveniences far outside the reach of most people on the planet. And whenever I read the books of Haruki Murakami, the highly contemporary Japanese novelist who has seen his country from the perspective of living in Europe and teaching at Princeton, while translating Raymond Carver and John Irving into Japanese, I recognize that Japan can appear as soulless, to a native, as sad with loneliness and loss, as London or LA can to me.

In the six hundred pages of his magnum opus, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” Murakami delivers a series of X-rays on modern, affectless Japan that amount to a virtual autopsy on a culture that’s lost dimension and depth, and dwindled into a reflexive creed of “I don’t think, therefore I am.” Almost all his characters have VACANT signs hanging up outside their souls, and float through life as through the pages of glossy magazines, hardly more substantial than the images they devour. “I was like a walking corpse,” says one character, and another says, “I was now a vacant house.”

“I had turned into a bowl of cold porridge,” a young woman explains, and the friendly unemployed narrator volunteers at one point, “I am a weed-choked garden, a flightless stone bird, a dry well.” Life is a numbing haze of Percy Faith orchestra Muzak and Dunkin’ Donuts mugs of coffee and cinder-block abortion clinics (so without weight or direction that it comes to seem like a waking dream).

Perhaps the most shocking thing in Murakami’s synoptic novel is that he comes almost to express nostalgia for the atrocities of the war, and the campaign in Manchuria, when people at least had lives instead of lifestyles, and a sense of intensity and humanity that arose from a close acquaintance with suffering (by contrast, the contemporary narrator blandly reports, “My reality seemed to have left me and now was wandering around nearby”). The other, quieter shock of his book is that all its dislocated fashion victims and Sprite-drinking teenagers, sleepwalking through their planless days as if on Prozac, might be dropping in from an Ann Beattie story. The hero wears a “yellow promotional Van Halen T-shirt” and listens to FM radio while cooking up spaghetti; the women he runs into are called Nutmeg, Malta, and Creta. “I felt a strange emptiness inside, a helpless kind of feeling like that of a small child who has been left alone in an unfamiliar neighborhood,” the narrator confesses, and it isn’t hard to see that the foreign country where he is stranded is a suburb of a chill and soundproofed future. Japan to Murakami certainly looked no better than Hong Kong or Atlanta did to me.

And so I sit at a small blond-wood desk in a child’s bedroom, with a stubby Hello Kitty pencil, a Japanese folder that says PERK UP YOUR SPIRITS (TRY TO TAKE THINGS JUST AS THEY COME), and a T-shirt (given to me in California) that says I DISLIKE FEELING AT HOME WHEN I’M ABROAD — GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, and write the essays in this book. On the desk in front of me is a pencil-box that says WELCOME TO MY HEART, a ruler from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (how it got here, I don’t know), and a small James Dean mirror with my quasi-stepdaughter’s name on it, a memento from a school trip to the Temple of Clear Water in Kyoto.

The items are the ones to be found in many a teenager’s room anywhere, but here they make up a kind of anthology of foreign worlds brought into this unremarkable modern flat: a huge sombrero from the Yucatan; a mock-Californian license plate that says IAN; a large poster of Hideo Nomo pitching for the Los Angeles Dodgers; and, next to a Japanese fan advertising the local Hanshin Tigers, a button from the Istanbul 2004 Olympic Committee.

I sit against the midnight blue pillow and listen for the sound of a motorbike, a familiar footfall on the stair.

That this is my home, I realize now in incidental ways; I can tell when the trees in the park are going to change color, and when the vending machines will change their offerings from hot to iced. I know when my girlfriend will bring out the winter futons from the cupboard, and when her daughter will change her school uniform from white to blue. I read Thoreau on sunny Sunday mornings, as Baptist hymns float over from across the way, and think that in our mongrel, mixed up planet, this may be as close to the calm and clarity of Walden as one can find.

One midsummer day two months ago, I took Hiroko to Kyoto on the final day of Obon, the traditional holiday in August when most faithful Japanese return to their hometowns to pay respects to their departed ancestors, and when the departed ones themselves are believed to return to earth for three days. It is a time of solemn obsequies and traffic jams on the expressways, and it is the time when, quite by chance, thirteen years before, I’d stumbled upon a Kyoto alive with ghosts and lanterns, and decided to return.

Heading now towards the eastern hills, the two of us walked along a broad avenue of trees, with the night before us, through a receiving line of lanterns, white, with the names of stores in black upon them. At the end of the gravel path, we passed through a huge wooden gate, into an area thick with the smell of incense and the sound of muttered prayers, men in priestly raiment hovering all about. Old, old men, from another age, walked past in kimonos, half-doubled over, to visit loved ones at their gravestones. Cicadas buzzed deafeningly, and lanterns began to glow as the sky darkened.

We followed the old men through a small entranceway to the south, and came out in a world of shining lanterns, for as far as we could see, all across the slope above us, zigzagging towards the heavens like fireflies trembling in the dark. Below us, at our feet, were the lights of the modern city, cacophonous, fluorescent, a distant hum; above us, stretching towards the sky, a shivering sea of golden lights, soundless somehow, and strangely disembodied, as if about to float into the night.

We walked up the steep slope, with its worshipers at headstones, and followed the paper lanterns up and up, past rows of illuminated graves, till it felt as if we were bobbing on the sea of golden lights. There was nothing really to anchor us, and nothing to see but the tremulous lights, and the ghosts who were whispering farewells. To my amazement, I realized that the moment I’d seen before, on my brief first trip, a decade before, had been real, and not, as I’d half imagined, some fabrication of jet lag and culture shock and wishful thinking. More searchingly, I realized, too, how miraculous it had been to come across the sight while here for only three days, on a stopover in Kyoto, and staying in a high-rise hotel on the wrong side of town: the gate was open only three nights a year, and in all the succeeding thirteen years, I’d never seen this field of ghostly lanterns.

I pointed out the magic to Hiroko (who, though born here, had never seen the scene before), and she, a part of it, confirmed that it was true.

Then we walked back into town and dined on a summer platform, along the Kamo River, while five great bonfires were lit up along the northern and eastern hills, spelling out a Chinese character. We moved, through girls in yukata and figures carrying lanterns, up to the northeast quarter, to stay in an acupuncturist’s flat in an apartment block with Global in its title.

That night, I fell into a deep, deep sleep, and found myself in a country house in England. There were only a few other people there: some flop-haired schoolboys, a woman who’d been kind to me in youth — and Hiroko. It was a lazy Sunday morning, and we were doing nothing more special than reading the Sunday papers and making the occasional witticism. Everything had a languid, undirected air; once, we went for a walk, in green, green hills, encircled in mist; once, I asked something about Egypt before the war.

Somewhere, Lou Reed was playing “Heroin” and upstairs there were some fashion magazines, and a few half-familiar figures drifted in and out. All the unremarkable languor of a weekend in the country.

And something in this unexceptional scene felt absolutely right. I couldn’t find the words, and I didn’t need to find them, but as I slept, I heard myself saying, of the everyday English scene, “This is my home. This is where I belong. Usually, I’m not very sociable, but this is me. This” — I meant the large redbrick houses, the gray afternoons, the musty light and dullness, the sense of nothing special going on — “is who I am.” Words I never thought to say in waking life, but here, suddenly, I could not just feel and see all the days of my childhood but taste them and be inside them, in this distant science-fiction land, on the night when departed spirits find their way back home.

Then I woke up, to the sounds of a bright Sunday morning in the northeast quarter of the ancient imperial capital of Japan, in the tenth year of the era known in English translation as “Achieving Peace.”

I go to sleep here every day by 9:00 p.m., in part so as to wake
up at 5:00 a.m., when my employers (thirteen time-zones away) are
at their desks (their office hours stretching from 11:00 p.m. to
7:00 a.m., Nara time). My research facility, if I need to check on something,
is an English language bookstore ninety minutes
away by train, and my version of the Internet is a copy of the
World Almanac. The person I see most often, outside my immediate
household, is the Federal Express boy who comes to collect and
deliver packages from distant Osaka. In this newly shrunken world,
I can complete articles or even books without having to exchange
a word with editors, and can draw out money in a local department
store from a bank account on the other side of the planet.

For breakfast, I generally enjoy some combination of asparagus
cookies or chlorella biscuits, chaperoned by what is here known
as “Royal Milk Tea,” and for lunch I go to a convenience store
round the corner, where all the goods of England and America are
on sale, yet nothing is quite as I would expect. Little old women
are photocopying Chopin scores to the sound of piped-in Clash
songs, and teenagers with safety pins all over their faces are
consulting magazines with names like Classy and Waggle and Bang.
Though the whole place is only four aisles wide, it is crammed
with wild plum chews and mangosteen candies, tubs of Grand
Marnier pudding and vitamin jelly drinks. There are ice-cream
sandwiches here made of Darjeeling tea, tandoori-flavored potato
chips and Kiss Mints that come in flavors of litchee and lime,
kiwi, “Wake-up,” and “Etiquette.” There are “Moisture Desserts”
and cups of “Mango Dream Snow,” injunctions on packages to
“Listen to the sweet murmurings of vegetables. You’ll feel
pleasure and find a smile.” Once, while munching from a bag of
potato puffs, I looked down, to see three characters prancing
around the bag, identified as Jean and Paul and Belmonte.

Usually, in the afternoons, I go to the post office next door
where all the clerks look up as I enter, as at the arrival of
their daily soap opera. My principal means of communicating with
the world at large is fraught with hazards: the envelope I’m
using (from my company) is too large — measured against a
transparent green ruler the workers wield — or I’ve neglected to
attach a Par Avion sticker. Once I was rebuked for including too
long a P.S. on the back of the envelope, and once, during the
holiday season, I came in only to be presented with a special
invoice for thirty dollars when it was discovered that my New
Year’s greetings exceeded the regulation five words.

Afterwards, I walk around the local park, past the “bad boy” son
of the electrician, polishing his Corvette till it’s red as his
waist-length hair, past the dogs that bark furiously at my alien
scent and children who back away as if at the sight of the summer horror
blockbuster from California. At one street corner in this
placid country neighborhood, there is a set of vending machines
where I can buy 49 kinds of cigarettes, 36
alcoholic drinks, 92 nonalcoholic drinks, and a
bewildering array of brightly colored cans advertising Corn
Potage soup and Melon Cream soda, Calorie Mate Block and Drafty
Beer. In the supermarket, grannies handle radishes with
black-fingered gloves and the shifty character beside me at the
butcher shop sports a gold star on his breast that says ASSISTANT
SHERIFF, LARIMIE.

Japan is notorious for treating all the world as a kind of giant
souvenir store from which it can mix and match at will, and many
a newcomer, to Kyoto, for example, is taken aback to find the old
imperial capital gaudy with “Think Potato” bars, “Amazement
Spaces,” and stores styling themselves “American Life Theater”
(while the Eagles’ “New Kid in Town” is piped into the geisha
quarter). Yet the impersonality of Japan, to me, is not that of a
country that hasn’t matured into character so much as one that
keeps its passions to itself. The public world strives to be
generic, to keep friction and confusion to a minimum;
individuality flowers behind closed doors.

And though the reach of such daily oddities is only shallow, I
often think of that moment in Christopher Isherwood’s “A Single
Man” in which a woman from Sarah Lawrence reproaches California
for offering “unreal places” instead of history and nuanced
depth. Instead of Gothic cathedrals, she implies, it serves up
Motel 6.

At this, Isherwood’s stand-in narrator replies with passion,
pointing out that it’s precisely the unreality of the look-alike
motel that prevents one from taking it too seriously; synthetic
surfaces, he says, are a good deal less likely to keep one
enthralled to them than that whole “old cult of cathedrals and
first editions and Paris models and white wine.” California
encourages transcendence, he argues, precisely because its
surfaces are so empty.

A position easier for an Old World exile to take, perhaps, than
someone native to its state of permanent revolution; yet a
salutary reminder that a place of hollow surfaces has some
advantages over one of seductive ones. It’s only the invisible
things that make us feel at home.

My next-door neighbor in the four-apartment building where I spend
my days is a Baptist minister who speaks perfect English, from
his student days in Chicago, and dispenses his wisdom from a drab
second-story apartment in the building across from ours, with a
cross on the balcony outside and a sign reminding potential
parishioners that attendance of a service brings with it a free
English lesson. Whenever he passes me on the stairs, he looks
away as if confronted by an agent of Beelzebub’s. By contrast,
the apartment upstairs from mine is occupied by a yamama (or
“young mother” crossed with “Yankee mother,” as the cunning
Japanese term has it), who greets me with extravagant delight
every time we meet, her long hennaed hair flying as she wrestles
with two toddlers, a stroller and the exigencies of her
leopard-skin attire.

Occasionally, Jehovah’s Witnesses appear at my door with copies
of The Watchtower in Japanese and, rallying at the sight of me,
pass over a page on which their prayers are printed in fifty
languages. Occasionally, telemarketers call up to plug some
international phone service, but they are quickly scared off by
my indecipherable answers. The world is here if one wants to
follow it, even in this historically most closed of cultures: my
local English-language paper carries even the scores of the
Albanian and Luxembourg soccer leagues, and the monthly
English-language magazine has notices for the Baha’i communities
of Osaka/Kobe, the Synagogue Ohel Shelomoh, even the Norwegian
Seamen’s Church, near its ads for “culture friendships” and
“marriage-minded Canadians.”

But what the people in my small apartment block enforce every
day is that, increasingly nowadays, a sense of home or
neighborhood can emerge only from within; I have never talked to
the Baptist minister or to the rock ‘n’ roll mother, but for both
of them, in opposite ways, I am a symbol of a world they cannot
touch. And I, in reverse, can’t begin to sustain the illusion
that I know very much about them (as I might do “at home”). The
Global Age reminds us of how little we really know about the
people we pass on the stairs every day; identity will have to be
deepened without much help from outside.

Every few weeks in Nara, in order to pay the bills, I take a bus
down the street to a bank with stained-glass windows where the
cashier, as she changes my dollar traveler’s checks into yen,
hands me a Nara Bank toothbrush, to ease the silence, or, as
often as not, two packages of Kleenex. One woman, on the Foreign
Exchange Door, greets me every time I visit with a rapturous
“Pico-san, long time no see!” and congratulates me on going back
to California to see my mother, or, on not doing so,
protecting my family here. When she is absent, her place is taken
by a grimacing superior who glowers at me with obvious distaste,
and pages through my passport in the hope of finding an
irregularity.

Afterwards, I generally stop in at the library, my only real
source of English-language news, and then at the Tsutaya Culture
Convenience Club, where, when I rent, say, Chungking Express (in
Cantonese, with Japanese subtitles), I am offered a choice
between a small box of Kellogg’s Genmai Flakes and a 289-page
book listing all the store’s animated videos. Though not
enormous, the Culture Club has special sections for every actor
you can think of (and many whom you can’t), right down — or up — to
Charlotte Gainsburg, Vanessa Paradis and Moira Kelly; and brings
home to me that even the things I know get translated into
something other here (as Jerry Maguire becomes The Agent, and Up
Close and Personal, Anchor Woman). When I watched Forrest Gump’s
rise to fame on video in Japan, I was surprised to see the hero,
during the turmoil of the sixties, attending UCLA (as the
Japanese translate Berkeley), though that is probably no stranger
than the local baseball broadcasts, with their talk of “dead
balls,” “timely errors,” and “sayonara home runs,” and their
habit, when the tying run’s on third, with two outs in the ninth,
of breaking for an ad for sanitary napkins or switching to the
next show because the time is up.

In short, the very notion of what is here and there — what is familiar, what is strange — has to be reconfigured in the modern world. In Japan, it is the apparently familiar things — the Western things (played out here, as it were, in katakana script) — that are most strange to me, as I have found it to be the tempura palaces or the Buddhas by the hot tub that are most curious, often, for Japanese visiting America. Speaking a foreign language one has scarcely learned is easier, perhaps, than trying to negotiate a tongue in which all the letters are the same, but ineffably scrambled, so that home appears as oh me, and life comes out as file.

And once a year, on the night of the harvest moon, I make a trip to the center of Nara, the imperial Buddhist capital of thirteen hundred years ago, and see costumed dancers in wooden boats ceremoniously floating around a pond into which a heartbroken empress once threw herself. A four-story pagoda is reflected in the water, and men in grass skirts brandish burning torches against the dark. Every now and then, the nighttime is pierced by the long, plangent wails of a bamboo flute.

The courtesans in their boats look out at us like wraiths, faces ghostly white and kimonos the color of blood against their crow black braids. The wind sends red lanterns fleeting against the trees. Old women, hunched over, carry luminous globes up hills like shadows from a Hiroshige print, and schoolgirls at the stands nearby giggle over Marilyn Monroe telephone cards and hand puppets in the shape of Buddha.

Somehow, at this ceremony for tourists (many of them Japanese, who are tourists in their own history), I see something I recognize.

Perhaps the way in which my neighborhood most solidly uplifts and steadies me is by virtue of its tonic blend of cheerfulness and realism, measured (as I see it) with the wisdom of a culture that’s been around long enough to know how to mete out its emotions. To many I know from the New World, the Japanese response to every setback, from terrorists to burning houses to long hours, crowded trains, and sudden deaths — Shikataganai, or “It can’t be helped” — sounds fatalistic, and too ready to surrender power to the heavens. But to me, coming from a California where it sometimes seems as if everyone is restlessly in search of perfection in his life, his job, his partner, and himself, it feels bracing to hear of limits that imply a sense of past as well as future. A republic founded on the “pursuit of happiness” seems a culture destined for disappointment, if only because it’s pursuing something that, by definition, doesn’t come from being sought; a culture founded, however inadvertently or subconsciously, on the First Noble Truth of Buddhism — the reality of suffering — seems better placed to deal with sorrow, and be pleasantly surprised by joy. In a world that’s overheating with the drug of choice and seeming freedom, Japan, for all its consumerist madness, suggests, in its deeper self, a postglobal order that knows what things can really be perfected (streets, habits, surfaces) and what cannot.

In practical terms, this very serenity — some would say complacency — is perhaps what gives an air of pink-sweater innocence to protected neighborhoods such as mine. I do not believe the Japanese are more innocent than anyone else, but they are, perhaps, more concerned with keeping up appearances, especially of innocence, and whole communities are urged to play their part in this display of public sweetness (it is certainly the only culture I know where women, to look seductive, don’t narrow their eyes, but widen them). Much of this can be converted in translation into what is regarded as hypocrisy, but it can also suggest a prudent drawing of boundaries in a world where they are in flux, and a sense of which illusions can be serviceably maintained, and which cannot (as the ad outside my building ambiguously promises: HONEST COSMETICS TO MAKE YOU FOREVER YOUTHFUL AND BEAUTIFUL).

The society urges its members to conceive of a purpose and an identity higher than themselves (people give you their business cards when you meet them here, but not their resumes or dogmas). And even punky nose-ring boys and scruffy Indians are implicitly urged to tend to responsibilities beyond their mortal bodies. I find myself picking up stray pieces of trash as I walk down the street (almost as reflexively as I find myself, now, bowing to a public telephone as I put it back in its cradle on my return to California); getting up from my seat in the bank, I stop to brush it clean as I would never do “at home.”

The homes we choose, in short, deserve a tolerance we might not extend to the homes we inherit, and in a world where we have to work hard to gain a sense of home, we have to exert ourselves just as much to sustain a sense of Other. I choose, therefore, to live some distance from the eastern hills of Kyoto, which move me like memories of a life I didn’t know I had. To visit the city of temples from here involves a ninety-minute pilgrimage by bus and train, and second train, and then another train, so that every trip has an air of ceremony and anticipation. Thus Kyoto is unclouded for me by the routines of paying bills and cleaning clothes. And coming to it from a suburb of white Ascots and Clever coffee shops, I still catch my breath when I see the lanterns in the autumn temples, leading up into the bamboo forests, as into another life, or hear the temple bells ringing along the Philosopher’s Path at dusk.

Once every six months or so, I take my girlfriend back to her hometown (her Oxford, in a sense), and for six hours we rent a car and drive deep into the countryside. The very novelty of motion, in a space of our own, with a tape deck of our own, is itself a small enchantment, and Kyoto swings open, often, like a heavy gate admitting us to a deeper, ancestral quiet.

One cold winter night, we went there to celebrate a ninth anniversary of sorts and, awakening in the dark, saw the year’s first snow coming down to cover the old spires and the few wooden buildings remaining in the center of town. Going out into the freshened chill, still hushed and smoky in the early morning, we rented a car and drove it up into the northeast, traditional area of demons and therefore monasteries, towards Mount Hiei.

As we left the town behind and began climbing the narrow, winding roads of the old mountain, we found ourselves in a festival of silver, the first car admitted up the mountain since the snowfall, and the only car in sight in a world of silence and whiteness for as far as we could see.

Everything was newly minted, virginal in the fresh snow, and the pines were still coated with a sugar lining against a sky now wide-awake and blue. We drove up and up, into a wonderland of sorts, with nothing around but green trees and — white, chunks of snow falling from their branches, and everywhere a newborn hush.

The large parking lots with their vending machines stood empty; the occasional tall red torii gates were fringed with white.

We moved along the road in a suspended state of wonder, through a soundless trail that cut high into the dark mountain. Stopping at last, we got out in a silent landscape of huge trees and silver everywhere. The sky was blue and the day was windless. There was no sound anywhere, nothing but dark trees, white lacing, stone Buddhas fringed with snow. A steep slope led up to a temple, hidden away in a grove like a secret pendant against a heart. Huge clumps of white kept falling and there was nothing else to be heard.

Outside Shyaka-do, we sat on a wooden platform while a gong sounded within and a man prepared the day’s austerities in front of a large Buddha. My stockinged feet were cold on the wooden steps, and as far as I could see, across the valley, there were just ranks of pines, in whitened rows, extending towards the cloudless sky. Then, briefly, four young monks in blue work clothes, tramping into the forest, headbands white against their shaven scalps. And the silence and the whiteness and the calm.

We sat for a while in the secret sanctuary, quiet on this quiet day. Then we drove back into the high rises and belching trucks and maddened pachinko parlors of the ancient capital.

A large part of the liberation of being here comes, I think, from the enforced simplicities that accompany a very foreign life. Living far from anywhere, without a bicycle or private car, I conduct my days, nearly always, within the boundaries of my feet; living without newspapers or magazines — and a television most of whose words are modern Greek to me — I can be free, a little, of the moment and get such news as I need from the falling of the leaves, or the Emerson essays on my shelf. Living in a small room, moreover, prompts me to be sparing, and to live only with the books and tapes that speak to me in ways I can respect. And not knowing much of the local tongue frees me from gossip and chatter and eavesdropping, leaving me in a more exacting silence.

This can, of course, be an evasion more than a transcendence, and in any case, I cannot hold very much to these austerities: I fly back to California every now and then to pay my bills, and sometimes I can’t resist turning on the computer to see how the Lakers are doing. I cannot refuse technology too aggressively when it is technology that allows me to communicate with bosses half a world away, and to get on a plane when I need to see a dentist. Yet being in so alien an environment is the first step towards living more slowly, and trying to clear some space, away from a world ever more revved up. In our global urban context, it’s an equivalent to living in the wilderness.

Yet even as the pilgrim thinks she knows where, and why, she’s going, the
beauty of every trip is that circumstances are far wiser than she is, and
she seldom ends up where she expected to. Her unseen partner on the road is serendipity. Several years ago, too settled in an office in Rockefeller
Center in New York, I decided to travel to the land I’d always dreamed of,
Japan; I wanted to learn about simplicity and kindness in a monastery. I
flew over to Kyoto, checked into a Zen temple on the back streets and, after
a week or so, found that the routine was much more familiar than I’d
expected. So I stepped out, and instantly found much of the compassion and
wisdom I’d been seeking — in the modern city all around, the woman standing at the temple gates. God comes to see us, as Emerson writes, without bell.

Like anyone, I’ve taken my pilgrimages in every direction of my inner
compass, and to every corner of the shrine I carry round inside me. Our
souls are always traveling, of course, and whatever we find in Jerusalem we
could also find at home. Yet the very fact of moving quickens our attention,
and jettisons our habits, in a way that leaves us wide awake to what
otherwise we might take for granted. So I have gone to Taos, to see where D.H. Lawrence conducted his “savage pilgrimage”; to Tibet, where local
pilgrims walk for months on end, across the empty plains, prostrating
themselves every step of the way; to Cambodia, most recently to see how
people live amid ghosts and broken memories. Once, traveling to the rock
caves around Lalibela, in Ethiopia, by mule, through a landscape of cedar
trees and olives, I was humbled to notice that the people all around me had
come on foot, traveling for weeks in dusty robes, while fasting. Why had
they come to this unprepossessing spot? Because, they said, between joyful
ululations, to come here was to come to heaven.

In the mind’s eye, a pilgrimage is generally a straight line, from here to
there (from being lost to being found); in practice, however, it is more
often a kind of circle, as in the ritual circumambulations that worshipers
make in Tibet, in India or around the Islamic Ka’ba. A pilgrim’s journey,
unlike a traveler’s, never ends; it only deepens. That is the thrust of
Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” — that all our life is a pilgrimage — and it is
part of the reason, I’m sure, why so many religions have a tradition of
mendicancy and wandering. The great contemporary pilgrims — I’m thinking here of Annie Dillard and Peter Brook, Van Morrison and John le Carri (a “secret pilgrim,” like many of us) — are all essentially traveling deeper into faith and doubt at the same time: deeper into complexity. In that
sense, it matters little whether they’re surrounded by tolling bells or
clanging sirens.

Yet reading the wonderfully varied and unexpected stories assembled here, I
was struck by how much the notion of pilgrimage today has to do with
retrieving a sense of purpose (and simplicity, and constancy); with putting
oneself, quite literally, in the footsteps of the past. Once upon a less
secular time, almost everyone made pilgrimages, and most of the great works of our early literature — Dante’s ascent into the stars, Chaucer’s wanderers to Canterbury, the tales of Orpheus and Odysseus and Hercules — commemorate both inward and outward journeys; these days, I suspect, many of us travel in part to experience pilgrimage by proxy. Most of the travelers in this volume leave home, as I have done, to partake of someone else’s pilgrimage, and so to learn what animates people to undertake such sacrificial tasks; the destination of pilgrimage is pilgrimage itself.

It’s striking, too, to see how many of these travelers are moving
deliberately backward. They go on foot — a relative luxury in a time of cars
and trains and planes — and they travel, often, in simple, anonymous robes,
with a staff, petitioning, as monks do, for their food and shelter. In an
age of flashing screens and jumbo jets, the pilgrim is a traveler into
candlelight. And a large part of the discipline he embraces comes in the
sloughing off of self — literally (as when Michael Wolfe becomes just
another hajji, generally addressed as Roy Thomas) and metaphorically (as in
Barbara Wilson’s searing account of how pain and rage in the desert annulled her previous stories of herself). “Abandon self, all ye who enter here” could be the inscription written on the pilgrim’s door; Rachel Kadish’s
powerful memoir reminds us that we travel partially to return to selves we
have forgotten, or people we didn’t know we were (for worse as much as
better).

Of course the pilgrim, like any traveler, is mostly traveling inside
herself, to a destination not found on any map. Yet there is a palpable
benefit in making the trip physically, on foot: The very feel of stones in
Jerusalem, Alane Salierno Mason says, “has a charismatic effect on the whole body,” much as, perhaps, the very act of getting down on our knees releases in us a kind of humanity and sweetness. The wonder, the intensity,
the electricity of pilgrimage are infectious — passed on like a holy
fever — and in Michael Wolfe’s ecstatic account of making the trip to
Makkah, we can feel the fires burning in every pilgrim’s heart (if Wolfe had
stayed in California, he’d have thought his destination was “Mecca”).

Distinctions get buried on the road, and the pilgrim is keeping company with kindred spirits from distant centuries and continents; the first pilgrim to Canterbury, we learn here, walking on his knees, was a king, Henry II,
traveling to atone for his execution of Thomas ` Becket. Even here in my
neighborhood in Japan, when I travel to my local temple I am taken out of
the age I know, often, by the sight of yamabushi, or mountain pilgrims, done up in an outlandish shamanic gear of trinkets and cowrie shells and deer skins. The pilgrim moves into a realm of talismans and spells.

In a sense, these powerful souls remind us, all pilgrimage is a trial, and
its adherents are tested by the road; the pilgrim is like the hero in some
classic fairy tale, asked to perform various deeds of heroism and cunning to
prove his love. Except in this case, the person asking is himself. In Japan,
when he was growing up, a 90-year-old Zen painter once told me, children
were taught to pay for suffering (it is such a privilege, and a catalyst for
growth); in our more comfortable cultures, many people have to go abroad, on pilgrimage, to measure themselves against a pain that is reality. The heart of all our faiths is religio, or a rebinding, as the Latin term suggests.

The final thing that hits me, traveling with these contemporary pilgrims, is
how fluid and beyond boundaries our pilgrims are today, in a world that’s
stepping across borders every minute: Gretel Ehrlich, a modern American,
treads a Buddhist path in China, just as many Chinese make similar trips of
worship to the Holy Land that is America (founded, after all, by pilgrims,
and “discovered” by another votary who thought he’d come to India). A
Christian learns from Buddhist monks, and agnostics learn from Christians.
I, though born a Hindu, have never been to the Hindu holy place of
Varanasi — and yet have been lucky enough, in our mobile world, to sit
before Notre Dame and Ayers Rock and the Buddhist caves of Laos. “To study the Way is to study the self,” the great Zen teacher Dogen said. “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by
all things. To be thus enlightened is to remove the barriers between one’s
self and others.”

At the end of every pilgrimage, of course, you learn that ends are new
beginnings, and that you see only what you brought with you. (Besides, “If
you can understand it,” as Augustine says, “then it is not God.”) The main
point of climbing to an icy cave in India, where a sadhu sits, is to realize
(as Anne Cushman says) that one might be better off in California; except if
one had remained in California, one would have always had unanswered
questions about an icy cave in India. In any case, whatever is discovered
cannot — or need not — be spelled out. “It is in seeking truth that we find enlightenment,” the Catholic Father Laurence Freeman writes, “not in declaring it.”

Thus the final redeeming beauty of the pilgrimage is that no step on such a
trip is wasted, and whatever happens, however difficult, is good. “To seek
God is to find him,” said Gregory of Nyssa, “to find God is to seek him.”
Peter Matthiessen travels to Nepal to find the snow leopard and discovers
that the main lesson he must learn comes from not finding the animal; Graham Greene goes to Mexico during the time of the persecution of priests and finds his modern savior in a broken, squalid “whisky priest,” who forgets himself by reaching out toward the suffering.

And so we go on taking pilgrimages, in part because every discovery, however unlooked-for, is a step forward; but also, more deeply, because every one of us carries around, inside, a certain, unnamed homesickness, a longing for a place we left and don’t know how to find again (the vision seen by Meaulnes in the haunting Alain-Fournier novel, the vanished Shangri-La sought by Conway in “Lost Horizon”). If there is a Golden Age behind us, we believe, there may be one ahead of us too. A pilgrim, ultimately, is a traveler moving toward the light, a light she hopes to collect and scatter across her path; where an adventurer may seek out a distant planet, the pilgrim only seeks the sun.

“All the way to heaven,” as Catherine of Siena writes, “is heaven.”

Yet for all the unyielding griminess, England remains the place where I was a child, careless of the future and in a state of perpetual discovery. It is the place where I stepped outside the hours, and had no sense of yesterday or tomorrow. And so, even now, half a world and half a lifetime away, in the country where I’ve chosen to make my home (a romantic England, you could say, or an exotic one, so much like the place of my boyhood that on these rainy Japanese afternoons I half-expect to hear the cricket scores recited on TV), I find myself returning to some quality of light and languidness and suspension that belongs to an English summer evening, the insects twittering as the lights come on as in a garden production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

A sacred place, I mean to suggest, is only a place where we get a taste of eternity — and that taste comes strongest of all, or most repeatedly, when we are hardly conscious of it (children, the Romantics believed, still carry with them a memory of the heaven they have just quit). The past is the site of our wounds, our fears, the habits that cripple us, the tangles we long to escape; yet it is — only it can be — the place from which we derive our most palpable sense of heaven. Every visit to Eden has a quality of recollection.

Many of us travel, more and more, to the “sacred places” of the globe — to Angkor and Luxor and Cuzco — and partake there of the sacraments and rites of someone else’s paradise; we are visitors, even trespassers, in a foreigner’s alien church. Those powerful places have a sacredness that hits us as the glance from a magnetic stranger’s eyes, but their magic is one that is not really ours to claim. The “sacred places” that lie in memory, individual as a thumbprint, or a scar above one’s right eye, are the personal piece of heaven that are ours to carry round with us, our barely discernible memories of life before the fall. The place, the life, the weather may all be everyday and unremarkable, but when I hear the opening strains of a certain hymn, I am walking through the lanes of a neverending twilight, the sound of a choir coming from behind some stained-glass windows, in a place as magical to me as Tibet. A place whose tiny limits give out upon sheer boundlessness.

Closing my eyes, I see the sun declining over fields and fields. I hear a tennis ball being thwacked, and the return of a quiet unsmudged for a thousand years. I see the first outlines of a moon rising above the trees, the sluggish water, the silhouette of ancient spires. I think that sacredness means only having so strong a sense of trust that we hardly know the meaning of the word, and find a world without change even in the midst of “dark Satanic mills” and a land so familiar that we know it’s home only because it’s the place we always — always — long to flee.