“I have traveled a little on my own and it was dangerous, because nothing is as attractive as unattended youth with all its arrogance and naiveté.”

‘Bruce Chatwin is long dead, but I keep coming across his photograph and his writing in old magazines, like postcards delayed and finally delivered when the traveler himself has gone on. Then I found Chatwin’s posthumous book, What Am I Doing Here, his ironic echo from the other side of the Styx. I never met Chatwin, although I would have liked to, and would have one day probably screwed enough courage together to write him, but that was years ago, and how many wishes travel and never arrive….’

Read more from ‘The Far Gaze‘, first published in Cimarron Review 157, ©2006.

For more of Diane’s work, see Publications.