As a consequence, all the van Brandens in the world only verified his ineluctable solitude, his impregnable skepticism when faced with the intractable vanity of all human enterprise, of everything undertaken by those unfortunate blind creatures who come to death without ever having suspected the marvel of the world or felt the miraculous passion which fires our knowledge that we are alive and that death, without beginning or end, a pure limitless present, is a part of that life.

. . . an ancient, restorative peace replaced the weariness of the road . . .

I’ve spent my whole life setting out on this kind of adventure and finding the same disillusionment in the end. Although I console myself eventually with the thought that the reward was in the adventure itself and there’s no reason to search for anything but the satisfaction of trying every one of the world’s roads, they all start looking suspiciously alike. And yet they’re worth traveling if only to stave off tedium and our own death, the one that really belongs to us and hopes we can recognize her and take her as our own.

Since what I now record on these pages deals exclusively with me, with what I see and the things that occur around me, it suffers from emptiness, a lack of weight that makes me feel like just another traveler searching for new experiences and unexpected emotions — the sort of thing, in other words, that I reject most deeply, almost physiologically.