A map can tell me how to find a place I have not seen but have often imagined.

When I get there, following the map faithfully, the place is not the place I have imagined. Maps, growing ever more real, are much less true.

In a single day the mind can make a millpond of the oceans. Some people who have never crossed the land they were born in have traveled all over the world. The journey is not linear. It is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body. The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

Fold up the maps and put away the globe.

If someone else had charted it, let them. Start another drawing with whales at the bottom and cormorants at the top, and in between identify, if you can, the places you have not found yet on those other maps, the connections obvious only to you. Round and flat, only a very little has been discovered.