Journey’s Ending

Contact!

A Book of Encounters
by Jan Morris
Norton, 208 pp., $23.95

In Key West once I ran into Jan Morris power-walking down Duval Street. It was a balmy January morning, and she was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. I recognized her immediately because I had interviewed her a few days earlier at the local literary festival. She had floored me with her thoughtfulness, graciously giving her time to everyone who requested it and then apologizing profusely for keeping me waiting.

So I didn’t think twice about interrupting her walk. She kindly stopped and we chatted breezily in front of St. Paul’s Church. Hoping to impress her with my travel writer savvy, I mentioned that I occasionally attended church abroad, on the theory that you sometimes met interesting people at the coffee hour. (In Porto, Portugal, I was served port.) She looked at me somewhat skeptically, and expressed a preference for the company of pagans. Then she continued on her way, striding past the tourists as if carrying the news of the ascent of Mount Everest.

This encounter does not appear in Contact! (it was understandably more memorable for me than it was for her), but it represents the type of brief moment in time of which this book is a rich compendium.

Contact! consists of pieces, not in the sense of collected essays, but actual pieces: vignettes, sketches, prose poems, word pictures. They recall a line of Nicolas Bouvier, that a traveler’s life is one of “stolen moments, reflections, minute sensations, chance discoveries and odds and ends.”