into a map, almost feel the air rushing on your skin as your eyes sweep over the far-flung oceans, the capes and blank passages wrinkled with crevasses. After reading Verne’s tale of Fogg’s mad dash last month I found a map that gives a pastel palette to time’s arrow, a calendar planner for the age of steamships and railway track. More days ticking by, more distant and exotic the lands in my imagination. And I began crafting my own time chart, with different shades to show the thirty years it took me to reach South America, the stretches of illness and idleness, lack of funds or will, the chance meetings and diversions that have governed all my weeks and months and journeys across this flat grid Earth. All the ports never visited. And the most dazzling, lurid shades reserved for the island dots and jagged coasts I still aim to paint before I kick out.
