DECEMBER 2, SATURDAY

MALAISE

I am writing this on Friday the December 8 as I begin to fill in the posts for the last week. Every day for the two months that I was in Sicily and in Greece something stimulating would happen. I was immersed in interesting places—Milan, Taormina, Lettojani, Athens, Santorini, Naousa, Hydra—to which I responded in words and photograph after photograph, so many that I could barely process them all and keep up. And then, thud, I was back, exhausted, and for the past week I‘ve been holed up in my house in the Swannanoa Valley, only going out to the grocery store and once or twice to a restaurant and barely responding to anything in words or photographs. Nothing provoked me to respond and I had the feeling that nothing would shake me out of this feeling.

This has happened to me again and again in my life, so it is no surprise. After every trip, and there must have been 40 of them, I feel a kind of malaise, a malaise that will sometimes last for months as I tried to fit back in. In the last two years this is the seventh time I have come back from a trip of one to three months and it has happened each time. And then the malaise gradually goes away. Today it is lifting because I suddenly have shifted to wondering about my next trip to Sri Lanka and India on January 15 for a month and a half and I have to suddenly make arrangements. For a year I have dreamed of sitting for two weeks in Nooit Gedacht, the old Dutch governor‘s home, now a boutique hotel on the white beach at Una Watuna just outside of Galle. The last time I stayed there 17 years ago it was $30 a night, now I discover it is a prohibitive $150 a night and even at that price they are fully booked. So I have to make new plans, and this forces me to wake up and begin responding to the world again. The first step will to begin responding to what has been swirling through my head this past week.