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I meet as an old friend. This gives me a genuine feeling of happiness. It is the practice of compassion."
    But I was not embraced as a traveler. I was seen as a stranger, sometimes a dangerous one. My experience of that conflict made me a writer.
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    One of the paradoxes of otherness is that in travel, each conceives the other to be a foreigner. But even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life. Every day we meet new people and are insulted or misunderstood; we are thrown upon our own resources. In the coming and going of daily life we rehearse a modified version of the dramatic event known as first contact. In a wish to experience otherness to its limit, to explore all its nuances, I became a traveler. I was as full of preconceived notions as Columbus or Crusoe—you can't help it, but you can alter such thoughts. Non-travelers often warn the traveler of dangers, and the traveler dismisses such fears, but the presumption of hospitality is just as odd as the presumption of danger. You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.
    It was as a solitary traveler that I began to discover who I was and what I stood for. When people ask me what they should do to become a writer, I seldom mention books—I assume the person has a love for the written word, and solitude, and disdain for wealth—so I say, "You want to be a writer? First leave home."
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    Except for "Down the Yangtze," all the pieces in this book were written since my previous collection,
Sunrise with Seamonsters
(1985). I have placed them thematically, in a way that seems right to me, rather than putting them in chronological order.

Part One
Time Travel

Memory and Creation: The View from Fifty
    O NE OF THE MORE bewildering aspects of growing older is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened.
    Of course, this is also the case when you are younger, but it is only with the passage of time that you're sure of the lie. I was driving up to Amherst with my parents a few years ago to accept an honorary degree, and my mother, who was excited and talkative, said, "I always knew you were going to be a writer."
    I said to myself,
No you didn't. You always said I was going to be a doctor.
    My father said, "Yep, you always had your nose in a book."
    I said to myself,
No I didn't.
    When I got to Amherst, one of the officials said, "Remember when we arrested you at that demonstration?" And he laughed. "That was something!"
    I said to myself,
It was horrible. About fourteen people on the whole campus protesting what was the beginning of the Vietnam War, and everyone else calling us Commies. The so-called student left was composed of freaks, misfits, kids with glasses and hideous haircuts, dope smokers, a jazz pianist, and a handful of Quakers. I had the glasses and the haircut. It was no joke. My uncle in Boston heard about my arrest on the radio, and he called my parents, and people said, "This is going to affect your whole future." My whole future!
    Someone else that weekend said, "Well, when you were editor of the student newspaper..."
    I said to myself,
I was never editor ofthe student newspaper, which was
actually quite a prestigious post and much more respectable than anything I would have chosen or been given.
    I think perhaps I have made my point, and I don't want to belabor it. But the subject has been on my mind a great deal lately: I have just turned fifty years old. Who wrote this?
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Fifty: it is a dangerous age—for all men, and especially for one like me who has a tendency to board sinking ships. Middle age has all the scares a man feels halfway across a busy street, caught in traffic and losing his way, or another one blundering in a black upstairs room, full of furniture, afraid to turn the lights on because he'll see the cockroaches he