The Territory of Desire

“What a powerful thing to know that one’s own desires are mappable on to strangers.”  from George Saunders, from a story about traveling to DuBai.  From “The Brainhead Megaphone,” I believe.

I love this quote by Saunders.  The idea of making your desires mappable as if we were all sailing into uncharted terrain.  One of the things I want to accomplish in this blog is to share the idea that the journey is the great metaphor for all that we do.  I like the idea that we have an inner geography that can somehow be charted and that we can share that map with others.  As Michael Chabon once said, the shortest difference between two heads is a story.  It is only in reading and sharing that we become porous, semi-permeable, accessible to others. 

People are unknowable but they can become less so in the journey of the mind into reading and in the journeys we take into any mysterious, uncertain terrain.  It is impossible to feel another person’s pain, but I don’t believe it is impossible to understand their longing.