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I am deeply grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and American Academy in Berlin for providing me time to work on this project; to Conjunctions, in which parts of this book first appeared in different forms; and to my graduate students at the University of Utah for helping me think about the shapes and means of being [[there.]]

:::: The day we pack the exactly three small UPS boxes my wife Andi and I allot ourselves for our five-month stay at the American Academy in Berlin, I happen upon this passage in Wayne Koestenbaum’s brainy meditation on the meaning of hotels:

Being-at-home, Heidegger says, is not the primordial phenomenon. Not-being-at-home is more fundamental. To be not-at-home may mean to be AT HOTEL.

:::: Then you are scudding above the Atlantic at 37,000 feet. It is afternoon. A few minutes later, it is past midnight.

A pair of celebratory scotches, dinner, and you try falling asleep, but at 600 miles per hour there is no rest, no comfortable position, and the lighting is all wrong: yellow, harsh, stubborn.

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