Where do I live?

I read your post on the River Project blog and I found it moving - a perfectly economical account of your motives in undertaking the journey. A few thoughts, not organised and offered just as they occur to me:

• There is a beautiful paradox in the idea that to find out where you live you have to leave home. This seems to me entirely true and yet strangely riddle-like.


• The statement that we live in 'a land of road markers and guide posts' through which 'every man must still find his own way' expresses a tension that I also think is powerfully real.


• When I join you for the first part of the journey, I won't exactly be finding out where I live because I will come to the US as a foreigner. (Unless one thinks in terms of living in the world or the west, but that isn't quite the point, I think.) What is interesting, though, is that in Doing Documentary Work Robert Coles consistently connects James Agee - one of the archetypal American figures in the documentary tradition as he conceives it - with George Orwell. And I find it difficult to think of anyone more British than Orwell. This is an interesting idea to me. I think I'm going to read The Road to Wigan Pier or Down and Out in Paris and London in the next few days.