I had with me on the train a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s reflections on Italy, although there seemed little reason to open it with the countryside of neat vineyards and smoky olive trees and rising Tuscan hills passing by in endless shades of greens and browns and faded claytile reds. But I felt some comfort to have him with me nonetheless. For despite all the splendor of the art and architecture that is Rome and Florence, and regardless of the overwhelming grace and beauty of the sculpted work of my favorite, Bernini (as if marble were the perfect medium to portray the suppleness of flesh and the emotion of the heart) it has always been to me the art of the written word that best conveys the emotion, the heartbeat, the triumph and tragedy of the natural and unnatural world in which we live. So I left D. H. Lawrence unopened on the seat next to me as I watched Italy scroll by, with the widow, unclean from the morning rain, reflecting a vague image of myself and my beautiful wife who sat immersed in thought beside me. But his words, much of which I had read over the last few day, were with me still, reminding of an Italy and Europe now long gone, of the brevity of life and living, of days yet still to come.

And as I walked along the rooftop of the Duomo in Milan, I was glad that I had read just the night before the words of Twain in Innocents Abroad as he described his own wonder at the great architectural and artistic achievement that the cathedral truly is (“so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems . . . a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath”). And glad also that there are words available to us, in whatever language one prefers or is forced to use, to describe such things in ways that transcend graphic depiction or photographic embellishment. How the rain ran through the granite gutters of the buttresses to give life and lifeblood to the great cathedral, to give animation to the sculptures gladdened, almost enlivened for the cleansing, to pour down unto the stained ambiguity of the Milano streets below.

And as I walked the streets of Paris too late into the evening with the Parisian lights always aglow, too early in the morning while the river softly misted and the city slept, and into the day with lovers entwined and hidden down along the Seine and the images of now far too many galleries, museums, buildings, ruins confusing my recollection before my trip was even over, I could not help but to ruminate on the words I had read the prior night from Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Of how, regardless of whether we who strive to be writers are born with talent—“as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings”—or develop our abilities, our literary “wings” so to speak, through long and sometimes desperate travail, at times those wings become “brushed or marred” in ways we might not even realize. That the struggle to be a writer is a lonely passage filled sometimes with frustration and sometimes with satisfaction but always with the fire of desire.

For these and other similar reasons, when I travel I always take with me literary companions—literary companions who have written of and know the places I am about to visit—to remind me, as I pass through the corridors of time that mark other lands, that just as artwork requires the constant care of the curator, so does the writer her/himself require the constant self-maintenance that often cannot come except by removing oneself from the familiarity of one’s own space and time and medium so that, to paraphrase Lawrence, we may remain whole, even in our partiality.