Of Beginnings,
And The First Gate
“Omnis peregrinatio incipit ante primum passum.”
— an unknown hand, on the inside cover
A ll quests begin, the senior cartographers will tell you, not with a step but with a refusal — a refusal to remain. The seeker stands at a threshold not yet visible to ordinary sight, and is summoned forward by an absence rather than a destination. The first gate is therefore not a gate of stone but a gate of *attention*; only the one who has learned to notice what is missing from his own life may pass through it. We have known seekers to circle the first gate for a decade before perceiving it, and we have known others to step blindly across it within an afternoon, never realising they had crossed at all. The atlas which follows assumes the seeker has chosen to see. If you have not yet chosen, close this volume and return when the question becomes louder than your comfort.1 The plates ahead make no concession to the unwilling reader, nor to the merely curious; they are designed for the one who has already begun, even before knowing it.
— the gate is older than the road that leads to it —
On The Instruments
A Seeker Must Carry
“Quod non portas, te portabit.”
— marginal gloss, in iron-gall
F our instruments are required of every seeker, and they are not what the merchants will sell. The first is a thin notebook, in which the seeker shall record only what astonishes — never what merely happened. The second is a compass that does not point north, but rather toward the unfinished work in oneself; this instrument cannot be bought, only earned through long sitting in stillness. The third is a small lamp of antique brass, which must be lit before each entry into a strange country and extinguished only at the threshold of return. The fourth, and gravest, is a single white stone, to be carried in the left pocket and never set down: when the seeker has forgotten why he travels, the stone, pressed in the palm, restores the original question.2 The seeker who carries fewer than these instruments will go far, but not deeply; the one who carries more will arrive at no destination at all, having mistaken his luggage for his journey. Pack with the parsimony of a hermit and the precision of a watchmaker.
— the white stone is heavier than it looks —
The Many Forms
Of The Obstacle
“Murus non semper ex lapide est.”
— on a wall in the Cloister of Sighs
T he obstacle is rarely the rock in the path. Far more often it is the conviction that the path lies elsewhere — that this is not yet the true road, that the true road must be smoother, kinder, more certainly *yours*. Of the seven principal obstacles catalogued by the elder geographers, only one is external: the wall, the river, the impassable wood. The remaining six are interior weathers: the doubt that masquerades as humility, the haste that imitates ardour, the comfort that arrives wearing the mask of wisdom, the bitterness one has cultivated as a kind of jewellery, the small voice insisting one is exempt from the common difficulty, and finally the homesickness for a home one was never happy in. When the seeker has named all six in himself, even the external wall becomes negotiable. To name is already to lessen. To lessen is to begin to pass.3 The cartographer's pen falters here, for these are not features of the land but features of the traveller, and no map can be drawn of the inside of the one who reads it.
— what looks like a wall is often a curtain —
The Midpoint,
And Its Temptation To Return
“Medium iter est silentium clamoris.”
— attrib. an unnamed pilgrim, fol. 41v
A t the midpoint of every quest there comes a moment of unbearable mathematical equality: the path behind is exactly as long as the path ahead. Here the seeker pauses, and into this pause flood, all at once, the most persuasive arguments for going home. They are excellent arguments. They are the best arguments the seeker will ever hear in his life, and they are spoken in his own voice. The cartographers have noted that, of all who turn back, the great majority do so within twelve hours of this exact arithmetical centre. The midpoint is not a place but an *acoustic*, in which the noises of one's previous life suddenly become loud again.4 The discipline of the midpoint is therefore not endurance but silence: refuse to argue with the arguments. Do not refute them. Do not concede them. Allow them to pass, like weather, while one continues to put down feet upon the road. By nightfall they will have hoarsened. By morning they will be merely whispers. By the third day, the road behind will have grown impossibly steep again, and the way forward will, at last, look downhill.
— the loudest voice at midpoint is always one's own —
On Companions,
True And False
“Comes verus tacet cum opus est.”
— a maxim, copied in three notebooks
T he true companion is recognised not by his words on a fair day, but by his silences on a foul one. He does not flatter the seeker's hopes, nor does he dismiss them; he holds them with the steadiness one would hold a chipped cup of valued china — with respect, and without commentary. The false companion, by contrast, is brilliant in conversation. He has theories. He has, at all times, an *opinion* on the seeker's progress, and the opinion is most often that the seeker should adjust his pace, his direction, his very questions, to suit the companion's own unspoken anxieties. Avoid him — not by quarrel but by quiet diversion. Walk a different road for half a day; he will not follow.5 True companions are rare and recognisable: they walk slightly behind the seeker on hard days, slightly ahead on easy ones, and beside him only when the road is wide enough for both. They share food without ceremony and grief without elaboration. They do not require the journey to end well in order to consider it well-spent. Such a one, met upon the road, is the atlas's own gift to the seeker.
— the truest one walked beside me three weeks before I knew —
The Final
Threshold
“Limen ultimum non ferro, sed cordibus aperitur.”
— inscribed above the lintel of the seventh inn
N earing the end, the seeker discovers that the final threshold is not a gate to be opened from one side but a *seam* to be unstitched from both. Here the world without and the world within are pressed face-to-face like the two halves of an oyster, and what is required is not force but a particular form of willingness — a yielding of the self that nevertheless preserves the self entire. Many seekers fail at this seam, having mistaken the quest for an exercise in conquest. They arrive armed; they are turned away. Others arrive empty-handed but defended; they too are refused. The threshold opens only to the one who has arrived permeable: the one whose long road has, by slow degrees, sanded down his armour without his quite knowing it.6 What lies beyond cannot be described in this atlas, for the cartographer's pen, like the seeker's compass, is calibrated for the road, not for the country at its end. Only this is known with certainty: the one who passes the seam returns *changed in a manner not visible from the outside*, and walks for the rest of his life with a strange, mild, unmistakable lightness.
— arrive permeable, or do not arrive —
Of Returning,
And What Cannot Be Brought Back
“Reditus non est restitutio.”
— inscribed on the inner board, in the author's own hand
R eturn, the seeker will discover, is the longest leg of any quest. The body arrives home in days; the rest of the seeker arrives over months, sometimes years, and certain *fragments* of him do not arrive at all. These fragments, left politely at various roadside inns, are not retrievable, and grieving them is part of the discipline of return. The seeker will not be welcomed as a hero — the village does not believe in his quest, having had its own quieter difficulties — nor will he wish to be. He will sit at familiar tables and find that the salt has changed flavour; he will hear the same songs and notice that one verse, the small one in the middle, has acquired a new meaning, undocumented elsewhere. He will be useful in ways he was not before, and useless in ways he formerly was. He will be asked, often, where he has been, and will answer ever more briefly, until at last he answers with a smile and a refilling of the questioner's cup.7 The atlas closes here, with the seeker neither departing nor arriving but at last, after long absence, *seated* — in a chair by a window through which a familiar street is visible, and inside him, quietly, an entire world he will not, in the end, attempt to translate. Proceed to Plate I when you are ready to be tested.
— some fragments of the seeker remain at the inns —
Here ends An Atlas of Longings, Vol. I, set in Cormorant Garamond, Sorts Mill Goudy, IM Fell English SC, & Pinyon Script. Bound in tooled Morocco; ribbons in Laurel Verdigris; rules in Lapis Manuscript; type stamped in Gilded Leaf. Vade in pace.