We all belong to traditions.

We may not choose our relatives, our birth-line or our birthplace, though there are beliefs against it, but we definitely choose our favourite writers, the ones with whom we find the most affinities. We choose to read and learn from them, we are moved and we are influenced by them. Even if  at some stage we put them aside for the excitement of a new acquaintance their books remain in our libraries,  our time with them occupying a space in our personal history. We often glimpse at the familiar spine, look at the cover; regardless of whether we ever open the book or not, it remains there, a soothing, a reassuring presence.

I have always felt that the community of writers is a network stronger than guilds, extending beyond time and space; it defies language and culture limitations, it trespasses all barriers and prejudices.

Writers speak to us from beyond their graves and stay alive as long as their words and the worlds they create survive.

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, Book One: Tea in the Sahara

page 12
“He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home…

At this point they had just crossed the Atlantic for the first time since 1939, with a great deal of luggage and the intention of keeping as far possible from the places which had been touched by the war. For, as he claimed, another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking. And the war was one facet of the mechanized age he wanted to forget”

First published in Great Britain 1949 © Copyright 1949, 1977

Italo Calvino,   If on a winter’ s night a traveler is a 1979 novel by the Italian writer. It is considered to belong in the postmodernist genre.

“Getting rid of the suitcase was to be the first condition for reestablishing the previous situation: previous to everything that happened afterward.” (page 18)

1- …how many times , when the past weighted too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break: to change jobs, wife, city, continent-one continent after the other, until I had made the whole circle-habits, friends, business, customers. It was a mistake, but when I realized that, it was too late.

Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.
/3.. It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I’ll turn the mileage back to zero, I’ ll erase the blackboard.
/4 The morning after the day I arrived in a new country, this zero had already become a number with so many ciphers that the meter was too small, it filled the blackboard from one side to the other, people, places, dislikes, missteps. (page 86)