These scenes, the lava and the bread oven and the gold loaves, had then morphed into little cartoon images that were familiar to him: they were the debased advertising logo of a brand of factory cookies, mass-produced, something from his own childhood. The experience was a reminder, he said, that when you attempt to escape the world, to leave it behind, you bring things with you. Understand that you can never leave purely, he said. We want to escape what ails us, into some idyll, but know that when you go, you travel with cargo, stowaways, souvenirs from the old world. Don’t be afraid of them.
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