Polo discovered paradise over there, you see, he traveled there and then came back. Casanova discovered paradise in the traveling, if you see what I mean – it wasn’t somewhere you could come back from. Polo flew with the arrow of time, he pointed forward and simply lived one day afer the next. As we all do, at least most of us most of the time. Today he is in the Kashmir, he travels forty days and arrives in Kashgar. He spends so many days in Kashgar and then travels so many days to the next town – and so on. He experiences life as a sequence of events, episodically. Casanova, by way of contrast, I think experienced life quite differently. My impression is that he zigzagged though time in search of timeless moments, blissful instants when the past and future ceased to exist for him – the only kind of spiritual perfection he could conceive of. His lust for another moment, always another moment, was his way of trying to blur these timeless points into continuous, amorphous rapture. He wasn’t hunting for happiness, in other words, which is always episodic, he was trying to experience bliss.

Yes, that’s true, but, again, not in search of experience, but of wealth. These men traveled to accumulate things, not to experience being alive.

He [Polo] served Kubilai Khan – the Khan of Khans – for seventeen years, he traveled all over China as his envoy, took part in sieges and battles, and by the time he returned home had traveled more widely across the earth than any other human being in history.

None of this is particularly interesting in itself, I suppose, but I remember suspecting when I read this passage that sentimental traveling is probably always erotic – in some sense. But which one?

Most people (he [Sterne in Sentimental Journey] seems to be saying) travel (and he means to the Continent) our of boredom (‘idleness’, he calls it, so much more aristocratic), curiosity (which is never properly fed), imbecility (I suppose he means people who can’t think of anything better to do) or else some kind of necessity – to escape creditors, to improve their minds, because they have been sent abroad by someone else and so on. You get the feeling Sterne finds all these reasons for travel in some way or other vain and misguided and thinks these kinds of travelers would do just as well to stay at home – especially if they’re English.) Lesser breeds are hardly considered – this was 1768 or thereabouts.) Now, the sentimental traveler, on the other hand, such as Sterne himself was, or affected to be, an altogether more modern creature – in fact, Laurence Sterne may well have been the first true example of the species. The sentimental traveler travels simply in order to observe the motion of his own sensibilities.

‘I think,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully, ‘it’s because each of them represents one important kind of journeying. Yes, I’m sure that why. Almost opposite kinds, in fact. And journeying is, after all, so fundamental to the way we humans think of ourselves and assign our lives a meaning. Every second book you read is about some kind of journey, really, isn’t it? And we constantly talk about paths in life – ways, roads, progress, stages and so on – all travel metaphors, when you think about it I would say that Marco Polo and Casanova have come to stand for completely different ways of traveling – and therefore of living out your life.’

I hate to think how often I’ve failed to notice what was happening to me at the time because my mind was taken up with preparing to retell it or repeat it or in some way consider its ramifications.

I’d followed their reasoning with close attention, as it happened, because, when you’re quite alone and haven’t spoken with anyone for hours (as can happen all too often when you travel alone), others’ conversations can fill your head as if they were your own.

In a way I suppose I am looking for . . . what word can I use? . . . re-enchantment – yes, re-enchantment. . .

The mere thought of unplanned time makes me euphoric – like free-falling from an airplane.

One of the things that annoys me about being a tourist is my own complicity in ticking things off. The Giottos – done, Church of the Hermits – done, Piazza dei Signori – done, and so on. Who cares? Like some medieval pilgrim, there I was amassing credit points with . . . whom, exactly? To whom would I present my report card? There’s something suspiciously religious in the most conservative sense about modern tourism. At least when you travel alone the temptation to tick things off is weakened. When you’re alone (in Padua, say) you’re less likely to give in to the snarky little voice telling you should see St. Anthony’s tomb, you must look at the ‘remarkable loggias of the Law courts’ (why?), you ought at least to look in on St. George’s Oratory. Why should I? You can say to yourself. In the infinitude of the cosmos what difference will it make whether I do or I don’t? I like sitting here, just looking at the red-tiled roofs and the tinted, buttressed hair. I’ll just sit.

It’s just that, sitting there on the square in the sun by a little fountain, I couldn’t help feeling regretful that travel in the old sense was now out of the question – traveling to whet your appetite, to pique your hunger, not to satisfy it. Do you know what I mean? Over and over again I think of something I once heard Paul Bowles say about travel: when he first glimpsed Tangiers on the horizon, sailing towards it, the thought struck him that this might turn out to be where he’d at last find wisdom and ecstasy. (And in a way he did, of course.) Wisdom and ecstasy. Understanding plus bliss. Romantic self-delusion, you might say. To which I might say: so what?

It’s not the number of things, surely, but the quality. It’s the subtlety of your vision that casts a spell on time, not the number of things you see. That’s the direction the needle on my compass points to.

It has nothing to do with expanding, but with deepening moments.

Partly it was the sense that every inch of the landscape I was traveling across was known – trodden on, measured out, marched across, fought over, built on, ploughed up, transformed, disciplined. This is wearying, it rinds you down. Quite untypically for me, images started to cross my mind of bushland outside Melbourne – thickly wooded hills scarcely stepped on in millennia, escarpments gazed at but never climbed, views out across valleys with no house or road in sight, cockatoos squawking somewhere up behind you in the trees.

To talk about dying and being dead makes us intolerably anxious, I think, not just about our own eventual fate, but about the pointlessness of our own present lives. Yet we’re living them, briefly, and to spend too much time contemplating and preparing ourselves for the aeons when we won’t be seems as futile as all the other things we do.

Desiring to be is one thing (to know, to see), craving to have quite another.

He would’ve said that the point is to desire to be, no to have.

How often does any of us have a moment like that in our lives? Of complete renewal, a moment when everything has a new beginning.

Why Anna Karenina in particular? Because it’s about all the things that are important – still, over a century later. It’s about different kinds of people trying to be happy and, on the whole, failing. The entire novel, it strikes me, is a brilliant attack on the notion of happiness, which your society and mine are, of course, still devoted to. The younger generation, I sometimes think, even feels affronted when happiness eludes it – it thinks it has a right to it, for some curious reason, it thinks happiness can be legislated for. Bliss, now, is a very different thing.

One of the reasons, it struck me, that beauty on this scale can cause a kind of angst or ache is that it reminds you that your everyday expectations of life have been too narrow, too colorless. So, even while you’re drinking in the abundant beauty, you feel a pang not unlike grief.

You rattle off down a rocky gully towards the lakes, toward Italy, and you can feel yourself entering, not just a different latitude, but a different world with different coordinates. To the east now is the Ganges, not the Urals, and to the west the Gates of Hercules, not the Liverpool docks.

I’ve been growing suspicious of the word ‘solitude’. It’s such an elegant word, so Latinate, it sounds somehow so elevated, but it seems to me to require a certain level of economic independence and social status to work. Otherwise it’s called loneliness, abandonment or desertion. Perhaps it’s a matter of balance. A few hours of solitude is enough for me, preferably during the day.

Once it’s dark in Locarno the massive, tawny flanks of the mountains across the lake light up with thousands, tens of thousands of tiny lights, some of them impossibly high up in the wilderness of escarpments and snow-streaked ravings near the peaks. That night they excited me, I think because of the sense of thousands of unthought-of possibilities hiding everywhere in amongst the barrenness and the banality.

I could see he thought this was some kind of moral failing in me. I was tempted to try to explain why I’ve lost interest in schedules and itineraries, but I didn’t feel we’d really reached the level of intimacy where I could say the things I’d need to say. It’s been very noticeable, though: now that time seems severely limited, I’ve lost interest in ticking things off, in accumulating credit, in ‘laying up treasures’ of any kind. Funnily enough, I’d have thought the opposite. But no, time now is for beguiling, not for spending profitably.

It attracted me, but not seriously. Something was missing. It looked embalmed, no pulse.

Arriving in Zurich you’re deeply conscious that in essence nothing has happened to you. I doubt anything can happen to you in Zurich, anything spontaneous, that is, anything rash or instinctual.

Overlooking the hostilities between France and England, Sterne spent an almost perfectly eventless day in Calais (an encounter with the innkeeper, a monk and a lady with ‘a pleasurable ductility about her’) and found the experience of it fascinating. His gift, as he knew, was an infectious curiosity – a gentleman’s but curiosity nonetheless. ‘Was I in a desert,’ he wrote, ‘I would find out wherewith in it to call forth my affections.’

To tell the truth, I wish I’d done it sooner. I’ve lived my life far too timidly, I now think, looking back. Not blandly, but taking too few risks. When the road has forked, I’ve almost always taken the better-lit, better-paved way, although I now suspect it’s often the other way, the grubby lane or path through the woods which most (I’m searching for a grittier phrase but fear I’m left with) enrich your humanity.

It was like waking up without a self in an unknown country, he said, which didn’t enlighten me much at the time.

There at the station the real adventure begins. I look at the indicator board to see where trains are bound for and consider where I might go: Adelaide? Wangaratta? Warrnambool? Guided by an infinitude of tiny impulses pushing me this way and that – my penchant for W’s, for example, or a sudden picture of ambling up Wanaratta’s main street one sunny morning months before – I go to Wangaratta. I nose about, drifting deliciously, catch a bus to Albury, fly to Sydney, examine the indicator board at Sydney airport, watch Harare and Osaka and Athens and Colombo flicking over, go to the ticket counter where, pushed and pulled again by memories so tangled I could never unravel them all, I open my mouth and startle myself by saying: ‘Osaka.’ From Osaka the ways branch out once more, fork and fork again, and I am borne along on memory, association, feeling and chance. Choice and will assume a new meaning, something closer to desire – the desire to be, of course, not to have.

Don’t you ever think, when you see a bus go by, with all those people sitting in it facing the front, their hair combed, their tickets in their pockets, their shoes chosen to match their coats, that they think they’re going somewhere? And that it’s ludicrous? I expect you either do or you don’t. I do.