Most likely we travel to exist in an analogue to our life’s dilemmas. It’s like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It’s immanence. It’s trying to be here.

Eileen Myles in her essay “Iceland” from The Importance of Being Iceland. (Just after this, she narrates her trip to Ísafjörður, the largest town (pop 1,200) in the Westfjords. I long to go back there.)

Photo: Darren Patrick