City Path: Following in The Heart of Don Juan

We sit. Two men bent over a text in Paris. The words have a lead on our lives, and we seek ourselves in them. We have a friendship extending back over two decades, although for the last two years we have lived in solitude on different continents, one of us in Europe, the other in America. And so by prior agreement we hollow out a time together over the new year in London, in Paris, renewing the friendship and talking. In our conversations we find that we have an affinity for the words of Castaneda—for the sorcerer's world of don Juan. So we agree to try to expand the friendship by writing together on a text. We turn to the books and the text chooses us. Later we will try to discover why. Now it is no matter. We each have our work before us. We separate. The sea divides us. We work alone, together.

However, to each of us, secluded in the privacy of his own study within his chosen city, is the awareness of the common friendship and the knowledge that for each of us it is the only relationship that has endured the time. To each, marriages, love affairs, and other friendships have come and gone. Only we survive. Jointly we are curious as to why; individually we set upon ourselves and the common text to discover a personal answer. What follows, then, is two men's reckoning with love and time, the poet and the analyst approaching friendship and the gods of the heart through the room of the common words.