VALLIS

Seneca wrote these words to his friend Lucilius, warning him against reading a little of everything. A person who is everywhere, he said, is nowhere. You can know many places and belong to none.

Two thousand years later the letter reads as if it were written this morning. We can be in five conversations at once and follow a war, a friend's holiday and a recipe in the same minute. It feels like being everywhere. By evening it is hard to say where we actually were.

A valley is the opposite. Hills on both sides, a river, one road in and one road out. You cannot see far, and you do not need to. The people are the same people, the bakery is the same bakery, and the evening light comes over the same ridge.

There is a kind of rest in that.

Being somewhere is simpler than being everywhere.

It asks for less and gives more back. In the evening someone asks where you have been. It is good to have an answer.