"D.H. Lawrence, in a letter written early in the last century, complained, "I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is no where to go, no 'new world.'" In Tristes Tropiques (alternately—and tellingly—titled A World on the Wane ), published in 1955, Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, "There was a time when traveling brought the traveler...

"One says in Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in the Republic: an in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house built round two sides of a garden patio: and of this house, one spot on the deep shady veranda facing inwards to the trees, where there are on an...