Rhetorically

We have been spending the past few days in "Hotel Paris," in a barrio in Santiago known as "Paris Londres." It is a lovely area, filled with winding cobble-stoned streets and cafes. After our jaunt into rural areas far to the south, it is wonderful to start each morning with fresh squeezed raspberry juice, real coffee, and a newspaper. I am very much enjoying being back in a cosmopolitan part of the world.

This is the end of my travel blog. I have been thinking a lot, of course, about what I learned during this semester spent in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Chile, in particular about what I accomplished by writing about my experiences in this public forum. One friend observed a kind of tension in these posts: as if I were trying to will what I said to be true. That may be what this has been about: trying to shape what seemed without shape, trying to make sense of the senseless, by putting it into words. Trying to use the will, in other words, to do the work of the imagination.