“Junior used to say he liked to live in hotels because he was a son of Englishmen. When he said ‘Englishmen,’ he thought of the English who came in the 19th century, of traders and smugglers who abandoned their families and everyone they knew to wander the parts of the world still untouched by the industrial revolution. Solitary and almost invisible, they invented modern journalism because they had left their personal histories behind.”
–Ricardo Piglia, La ciudad ausente (The Absent City). Translated from Spanish by Margaret at Necrophiliac’s Diary.