If you can, every now and then it is good to escape the reality which you have settled into. Of course, youth is the time to escape as much as possible before reality has even had time to settle. With the passing years, career, marriage, children, and steadily gathering responsibilities, the opportunities to escape reality grow fewer and in any case the inclination to escape gets weaker and weaker. The prospect of cruising the world and attending all the festivals palls compared with the luxury of enjoying what you have come to know and love. The garden at your doorstep beckons more seductively than the golden groves of Hindustan. I myself have become as much as anyone, and I think more than most, a creature of comfortable habit and routine.
Still… the urge to seek new worlds does not quite disappear – though the decrepitudes of age and the horrors of modern travel reduce the ambition to venture forth to an occasional twinge of desire.
Fortunately, the desire for adventuring in new realms is comfortably satisfied by travelling in the marvellous kingdoms which books discover and deliver beyond the confines of the world you know. Hardly a week passes without the experience through reading of a different country, a long-ago age, a completely foreign way of life, some land whose history and geography are
