Before the first piece

Some trips end at the airport. The good ones keep unpacking themselves for months.

I should say, before anything else, that I never expected to be a person who took many trips at all. I come from a country where travel was the kind of thing other people did, and even within it, most of my life happened inside a small handful of familiar cities. The idea that I'd one day move through the world with any ease would have sounded, to my younger self, like someone else's story. But somewhere along the way, without me really planning it, the map opened. More than a hundred international cities now. Twelve countries. None of it the result of a deliberate plan, mostly it was work, or an invitation, or a door opening at a moment I happened to walk past it. I still find the whole thing slightly implausible, and I think that's part of why I'm writing.

Because the good ones keep unpacking themselves for months.

I've been carrying around a pile of half-formed thoughts for a long time now, things I saw, things I read, small moments that wouldn't leave. Most of them never made it into conversation, because conversation has a clock and these things don't. A friend asks how the trip was and you say it was good, and the real answer, the one about the old man selling pomegranates outside the mosque, or the strange cold you felt inside an empty library, or the line from a book that followed you home, doesn't have anywhere to go.

So I'm building it a home.

A slow blog

This is a slow blog. I want to say that up front, because I know how blogs are usually introduced, with a posting schedule, a promise of value, a bullet-pointed list of what you'll learn. I don't have any of that. What I have is a practice, and the practice is this: I travel to places that have a long memory, I read old things about them, and I try to think carefully about what any of it means. Then I write it down. When it's good enough, I publish it here.

Most people treat these as three separate interests. Travel is one shelf. History is another. Philosophy, when anyone reads it anymore, is a third. For me they've always been the same shelf, or the same question. When I'm standing in the ruins of something, I'm not just looking at architecture. I'm thinking about who built it, what they believed, why they bothered, what they were afraid of. And under all of that, always: how their answers might quietly have a word or two to say about mine.

I'm not writing this as an expert. I'm writing as someone who, through more luck than planning, has ended up in places he never expected to stand in, and has reached the point where, if I don't put the thoughts down somewhere, I'll lose them. That's the honest version. A commonplace book, kept in public.

What you'll find

Roughly, here's what you'll find as the archive fills.

• Journeys will be travel pieces, usually about a single place I've spent real time in, written slowly.
• Histories will be the longer reads into something specific, a period, a person, a single strange object.
• Reflections will be the essays, where I try to think clearly about something that's been pulling at me.
• Field Notes will be the shortest pieces. The fragments. The ones I can't justify expanding into essays but can't bring myself to throw away. This is one of those.

There's no schedule. I'd rather give you one piece I'm proud of than four I'm not. Some months there will be two. Some there will be none. The archive will fill slowly, and that's the point.

If that rhythm sounds like your rhythm, I'm glad you're here. If you'd like to know when new pieces land, there's a newsletter at the bottom of most pages. It sends rarely, which I think is the only honest way to run one.

Mostly, though, thank you for reading. It's a strange and kind thing, to give your attention to someone else's thinking, and I don't take it for granted.

The first real piece is on its way.

Hassan