Q&A …

… Aaron Poochigian: in Venice, I will feel like a pilgrim at a holy site. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere, USA, so I escaped, through literature, into various exotic locales. There were legendary cities—Troy, Athens, Venice, Paris. Half-myth, half-history, these places were attractive to me because they seemed the opposite of where I was. Often, when I was living in Athens, I succumbed to a feeling of the numinous, simply because I was there, where Socrates had lived, where Aeschylus had written his tragedies. I will no doubt feel the same way in Venice, like a pilgrim at a holy site.