This last week I have been paying a round of goodbye visits, for I think it will be some time before I see Alexandria again. It has become stale and profitless to me. And yet how can we but help love the places which have made us suffer? Leave-takings are in the air; it's as if the whole composition of our lives were being suddenly drawn away by a new current. For I am not the only person who is leaving the place - far from it. Mountolive, for example, will be leaving in a couple months; by a great stroke of luck he has been given the plum post of his profession, Paris! With this news all the old uncertainties seem to have vanished; last week he was secretly married! You will guess to whom...

There are a hundred things to attend to before I start the bore of packing. As for you, wise one, I have a feeling that you too perhaps have stepped across the threshold into the kingdom of your imagination, to take possession of it once and for all. Write and tell me - or save it for some small cafe under a chestnut-tree, in smoky autumn weather, by the Seine.

-From Clea, Lawrence Durell