Tag: journeys
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Journey to “Last Rose Of Summer”
Whoever reads this, you have found it. It does not matter where. It does not matter when. You have found this on a desk, or in a drawer, or in the pocket of a coat that belonged to someone you knew, or you picked it up from a table at a hotel you will never…
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Journey to “Morning”
The Eve The year in which he had lost everything it is possible to lose ended not with a bang but with a plane ticket. After the airport in Mumbai, the year of holding on and then the release, the year of the flight he took and the one he skipped and the one that…
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Journey to “My Dreams Of Tomorrow”
The News The letter was old when it reached him — carried by cart, then boat, then cart again through the spring mud, and delivered by a merchant’s boy who did not know what he carried. Poliphilos unrolled it by candlelight in the guest-room of the monastery where he was staying. It was not addressed…
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Journey to “Free To Fly”
I. The Invitation Venice in the aftermath of the Biennale behaved like a city with a headache: the party was over, but nobody had cleared the glasses. Gallerists who had spent June saying darling to each other now crossed the campo in opposite directions, and the ones who didn’t cross fast enough had learned to…
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Journey to “Underwurlde”
That Italian journal The rain over Berlin had the patience of something that intended to stay for weeks. Poliphilos had taken the corner table in a café off Prenzlauer Allee, the one farthest from the speakers, and worked his way down through a stack of archaeology journals the way other people worked through newspapers: sideways.…
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Journey to “I Held You Once”
Landside The taxi coupon already paid, forty rupees folded into the driver’s visor anyway because some transactions end with a tip and this one ends with a year, the window down, the driver saying something about the traffic at Andheri that the radio was also saying, while the August heat was pressing against the car,…
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Journey to “Poliphilos’s Party”
The Island Says No Prologue: The Leftovers Once. They. Were. Gods! Now they lived on an abandoned island, because everybody who is somebody migrated to America. Indeed, in the mid-19th century, as the great steamships churned across the Atlantic carrying empires, fortunes, and the promise of a new dawn and gold, the major deities migrated…
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Journey to “Love Boat”
The Boat The ship was a floating hotel with a deck plan that changed at the whim of the tide. Poliphilos boarded in Southampton on a Tuesday that felt like a Friday, carrying a suitcase and a contract that described him as a dance pianist and occasional vocal partner. The employment agency had called it…
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Journey to “Skylark”
Doin’ the Pompeii Late last summer Poliphilos was passing by Pompeii when he heard a strange sound. The Italian heat sat upon the skin like in August like it has done for millennia, and pressed his emerald green Indian silk suit into the bones like a heavy, ancient weight. The air in this region smelled…
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Journey to “European Son”
The Letter and the Flight The letter arrived at his Scandinavian getaway on heavy, cream-colored parchment, sealed with wax that smelled of river mud and old pine. It bore no return address, only a single line in elegant, spidery script: The River is being drained. Come. The Maidens Poliphilos knew the handwriting. It belonged to…