Voices, Places

“There is no capital of the world, neither here nor anywhere else . . .”

—Czeslaw Milosz

Question:

How is Venice like Idaho?

Answer:

Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway.

And how are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them. The voices of great writers guide us without telling us where we are going—except, of course, to that most obvious destination of all. We are guided by ambiguity— that’s the way literature works. And the way travel works as well. Travel is a curiosity. We understand it only when we stop moving, sit still, and begin to listen back.

These are notes from a journey of surprising correspondences, distant rhymes. Voices, places. They begin at startled dawn and end with an unpacked suitcase, and in between lie impressions both Mediterranean and Pacific. Impressions are presences you cannot hold on to, like lives.

Bells

We woke each morning to church bells in Nauplion, the beautiful Venetian port in the Peloponnesos and the first capital of modern Greece. The nearest bells beat out a pattern you could dance to:

• onetwothreefour

• onetwothreefour

• onetwothree

• onetwothree

• onetwothreefour

Weeks later the bells in Venice were more profound, authoritative, gonging beyond the big domes as if to sound out heaven:

• God God God God

Everything in Venice possessed weathered confidence—even the odd face screaming in silent fragments from a wall. Every corner presented another vision of life with its monsters of grace.

Greece had been otherwise: so many of its churches, chapels, and monasteries in remote, unpopulated places. In Mani, the long rough peninsula between snowy Taygetus and the Ionian Sea, the churches used to be left open—no longer possible with the increase in tourism, vandalism, and theft. At one gorgeous little church the bell hung outside in an olive tree. It was off a footpath to the spit of land called Tigani, or frying pan. The anonymous frescoes inside were finely modeled and undamaged. The saints I have forgotten now, but not the silence of the thorny and rocky land, the bell, and the calm sea.

That bell was such a small clear voice.

There are voices that cut through the detritus of the world, some of them without sound, voices seemingly inside the dome of the mind. These are voices we follow all our lives, too many of them even to name. Among the voices I hear are two Americans with strained relations with their native country, two writers whose stock has fallen, at least in some circles. It is necessary to reread writers whose stock has fallen.

Let us follow them awhile. There is no path, but there are footsteps, dark as ink. They will not lead in a straight line, but circle back upon themselves like readings of a poem. There is a memory of bells—goat bells, church bells—weathering in the years. Follow the echoes.

Ez

What were his earliest memories? What did he know at the end, when they took him to the hospital in Venice? What does dementia erase?

We were in Idaho, driving west on Highway 20 past the Craters of the Moon. We stopped so my wife could photograph the eerie light, the sage against black volcanic buttes and canyons and shrouding clouds. I picked up pieces of pumice like sharp lumps of charred breath.

In magic hours, traveling in place means traveling in time, as if a door opens and you see through to the eternal presence. I had premonitions all along that road, notions of connection.

On the map I saw Hailey, Idaho, just ahead. Pound was born there. And Hemingway shot himself just up the road, in Ketchum. In Venice not two weeks earlier we had seen Pound’s grave. Maybe this would round out the journey in some way, give it shape. Maybe Venice and Idaho were not so far apart.

When we turned north off Highway 20, it was into another state. The wealth of outsiders and ski resort people came into view with the big ranches, the white fences, the bike paths. The bare hills were immaculate.

In Hailey we saw the small white...