I Think America The Symbol And America

I Think That Foreignness Is Always With You. Indeed, I Find California More Foreign To Me The Longer I Live Here. In Thirty Years Of Living Here On And Off, It Hasn't Lost Anything Of Foreignness. If Anything, It Has Gained.

Just As There Are Many More Californians Now To Be Found In The Temples Of Kyoto Or The Villages Of Bali Or The Mountains Of The Himalayas Than Ever Before, What Is Also Exciting Is That One Can Just Go Downtown Santa Barbara And Find Ayurvedic Medicine, Thai Restaurants, And Japanese Cars In Abundance.

I Am Simply A Fairly Typical Product Of A Movable Sensibility, Living And Working In A World That Is Itself Increasingly Small And Increasingly Mongrel. I Am A Multinational Soul On A Multinational Globe On Which More And More Countries Are As Polyglot And Restless As Airports. Taking Planes Seems As Natural To Me As Picking Up The Phone Or Going To School. I Fold Up My Self And Carry It Around As If It Were An Overnight Bag.

So Travel For Me Is An Act Of Discovery And Of Responsibility As Well A Grand Adventure And A Constant Liberation.

As A Member Of The Mainstream Media For Many Years, I've Learned Just One Thing: Never To Trust Anything I Read In The Mainstream Media - Not Because Of Any Agenda Or Deliberate Dissimulation, But Simply Because It's Filtered And Comes Very Often From Someone Whose Judgment I Might Not Trust In Other Circumstances.