Art museums and geographical exp­loration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.

Eighty-five years after Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, another film on the identity of the Inuit was hailed as a masterpiece around the world. This time, the director was himself an Inuit, Zacharias Kunuk, and his film told an Inuit story, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Something new, something that demanded a different receptive method for a different voice, was being shown, and, in the process, the audience was taught another way of seeing, a viewpoint from within the other culture itself.

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have written enthusiastic reviews, and the booksellers I know tell me that it’s selling well. I haven’t read the book.

Among the innumerable contributions of Geist to world culture, the Geist maps are not the least important. This noble genre that marries geography and the higher arts has, I have discovered, its particular ancestors, and can claim an aristocratic lineage that goes back to the days before the French Revolution.

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

No one can ignore that the publication of several caricatures of Mohammed in a number of periodicals around the world (first in Denmark, as a joke, then in other countries, as an act of defiance) ignited the furious protest of various Islamic groups. History repeats itself: faith, which is supposed to be the unmovable pillar of a true believer, seems to shiver and shake when confronted by a mere artistic creation, with a brushstroke or a few scribbled words, while in the name of the Supreme Being, his followers announce that a fit of divine temper is imminent.

Several times, during a long life of reading, I’ve been tempted to write an autobiography based solely on the books that have counted for me. Someone once told me that it was customary for a Spanish nobleman to have his coat of arms engraved on the headboard of his bed so that visitors might know who it was who lay in a sleep that might always be his last. Why then not be identified by the books at my bedside that, better than a symbolic shield, define and represent me?

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.