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'Sometimes, when I am in a period of great anxiety, I fantasise about running away. I am alone and anonymous in a European city like Venice. The distance from every-thing I know, and the solitude, seem luxurious, spacious, calming. What am I running away from? Or what, specifically, am I seeking? I've had this fantasy for a long time. For as long as I've had intimate .relationships, and wanted to be incredibly close to another person. For as long as I've been seriously writing. For as long as I've been seeking the space, and time, to develop and explore my own imagination. This whole time, like most writers, I have worked, studied, juggled opportunities and obligations. That is life; that is what we do.' (Introduction)
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Epigraph:
My flight may, indeed, have begun that summer - which does not tell me where to find the germ of the dilemma which resolved itself, that summer, into flight. Of course, it is somewhere before me, locked in that reflection I am watching in the window as the night comes down outside. It is trapped in the room with me, always has been, and always will be, and it is yet more foreign to me than those foreign hills outside.
- James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room, 1956
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