solitudo
These are stories of desolation. Sometimes they are a voyage towards, and sometimes they are an attempt to escape from. No matter. The traveller ventures to modern ghost towns, ancients ruins, or the wreckage of their own lives, and never really finds any answers – because there are none, not to the questions worth asking. Isolation is the comfort of travel writing; there is the illusion of sympathy, of course, but the balm lies in the acknowledgment that reader, writer, everyone is ultimately unknowable and alone.