The only real traveller with soul that I’ve known was an office boy at another firm where I was once employed. This young fellow collected promotional brochures for cities, countries and transportation companies; he had maps that he’d torn out of journals or that he’d asked for here and there; he had illustrations of landscapes, prints of exotic costumes, and pictures of boats and ships that he’d clipped out of newspapers and magazines. He would go to travel agencies in the name of some imaginary office, or perhaps in the name of a real office, perhaps even the one where he worked, and he would ask for brochures about trips to Italy, brochures about excursions to India, brochures listing the boat connections between Portugal and Australia.

He was not only the greatest – because truest – traveller I’ve known, he was also one of the happiest people I’ve had the privilege to meet. I regret not knowing what’s become of him, or rather, I pretend I should regret it; in fact I don’t, because by now, ten years or more after the brief period when I knew him, he must be a grown-up, a responsible idiot who fulfils his duties, perhaps as a married man, somebody’s provider – dead, that is, while still alive. And maybe he has even travelled in body, he who travelled so well in his soul.

I just remembered: he knew the exact route of the train from Paris to Bucharest as well as the routes of all the trains in England, and as he mispronounced the strange names, I could see the glowing certainty of his greatness of soul. Today, yes, he probably exists as a dead man, but perhaps one day, in his old age, he will remember how it’s not only better but also truer to dream of Bordeaux than to actually go there.

Then too, all of this may have some other explanation: he may just have been imitating someone. Or… Yes, I sometimes think, given the appalling difference between the intelligence of children and the stupidity of adults, that in childhood we’re accompanied by a guardian spirit who lends us his own astral intelligence, and that later, perhaps with regret but compelled by a higher law, he abandons us – like animal mothers after they’ve nursed their young – to our destiny as fattened pigs.