NO ONE CAN TELL ME WHERE TO FIND IT. NOT the young policeman chatting up the pretty jogger in yellow butt-hugger shorts on Water Street (Devon Row? Moses Harvey? Squid? Are you sure you’re talkin’ about St. John’s, Newfoundland?). Not the docent at The Rooms, the “new” Newfoundland Museum, built with some misappropriated stainless-steel-and-glass ultramodern dedication to some anorexic hip-bone angularism, which looks like the offspring of the phoenix and crapola.
All of these on-the-ground scenes wherein I basically stalk the current resident of Moses Harvey’s house were written last, after the rest of the book was already written. I had hit a wall in the writing process and had to light out for Newfoundland in order to conduct on-site research, and walk the same morning walk that Harvey ritualistically walked (the one that led him on that fateful morning, to the giant squid), and get drunk with Harvey’s descendants, and immerse myself in what the filmmaker Werner Herzog sometimes controversially refers to as “the voodoo of place.” Traveling seems to intensify one’s penchant for self-reflection and self-pity, for loneliness, for the shoehorning of one’s own life into some larger socio-cultural context. And all of these actions and desires— while traveling, especially, and snapped out of one’s comfort zone— are again likely misguided and obsessed with all the wrong beautiful things, and thereby terribly, heartbreakingly human. And, in my case, worth shuffling through on the page, via multiple drafts of course. How has the act of traveling inspired you in your life? How has it changed you?
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