"Talking about the authentic is often what we do when we the overfed and privileged are discussing the fetish we cultivate for lives that look unchosen, for lives that are inherited, and thus seem to us unbeset by the anxiety of choosing one thing over something else. We juxtapose the inheritances that structure a traditional...

"Part of what interested me so much about pilgrimage as a concept—what made me think it might work as a structure to hang a bunch of other stuff (questions of restlessness and purpose and forgiveness) on—was that, the more I read and talked and thought about it, the more capacious the idea seemed: Pretty much...

"In medieval times, when life was so narrowly circumscribed, religious pilgrimage was pretty much the only excuse a claustrophobic peasant had to leave his or her stupid little village, so a pilgrimage was an exercise in novelty and adventure under the banner of obligation; now, so many of us feel so surfeited with choice, the...