Death is the worm with a voice of silk thrumming seductive estrangements—filaments of the uncanny—in the traveler’s ear.

—Epitaph for Marco Polo and 鄭和

The traveler’s hunger for more life is, he knows darkly, a desire for more death—a more arresting, more heartstopping, more breathtaking death.

—Epitaph for Arthur Rimbaud and Sigmund Freud

Nowhere lie the nameless innumerable, erectors of staggering monuments commemorating the ages’ most eminent enslavers.

—Epitaph for Ashoka and Walter Benjamin

We are all relics of voluminous dead, quickening our thoughts, animating our sinews.

—Epitaph for W.G. Sebald and Richard Dawkins

Every journey is a passage to Hades, every instant, a crossing of the Styx.

—Epitaph for Heraclitus and Nietzsche

Journey falls sick

Vagabond dream takes off

Grass goes on greening and dying

—Epitaph for Basho and Van Gogh

Death is a universal language.

—Epitaph for Padmasambhava and Noam Chomsky

Traveling through space is traveling through time; advancing to the future, simultaneously regressing to the past: locked in a fatal embrace, the living and the dead always arrive together at the present to depart—apart—at the same time.

—Epitaph for Marcel Proust and Lee Smolin

How

to leave

the dead

with

the dead

to live

with

the living?