A Traveler' Education / Magic Casements

Why another travel book (or two)? Why any travel book at all? Well, one visits places, one gets enthused, one wants to communicate such feelings to someone else beginning with one’s friends (my travel book is based on long letters I wrote over many years to a friend, who finally told me they needed to be published). In the process one never knows when one might be helping someone else to choose his or her own next or even first trip.

Many of my trips have been planned after I’ve read some piece of writing about a place. One person’s enthusiasm provokes another person’s curiosity. The expression of our enthusiasm may be a service which we provide to others. Friends of mine who have read A Traveler’s Education and/or Magic Casements have used my descriptions to plan trips of their own or they say that (having filed my books carefully aside) they hope to use them someday to plan trips. I am touched and honored by such practical applications made from my writing. They do not, however, prevent me from thinking about my travel writings in a different way also, almost as another form of fictional writing in which I build up a character who truly amazes and amuses me the longer after the fact that I read about his behavior.

That fictional character is of course my crazy self, obsessed with art with music and with the nature of travel itself.