Room One Thousand

A list of city names is enough to evoke the wonder of travel. “Trieste, Zurich, Paris.”—the closing line of James Joyce’s classic Ulysses—provides, as Alain de Botton writes, a record of the book’s production and the cosmopolitanism it grew out of. “Cairo, Bombay, Shanghai” traces other passages, trade routes perhaps or the wandering imagination of oriental fantasies similar to those that run through “Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca.” Thus listed, cities act like nodes along longer lines of travel. While some networks forge the outlines of territory, others trace less grounded modes of connection. The itineraries of travel, scribbled on parchment, etched in stone, or uploaded online, simply serve to recall journeys between places and the connections made and then subsumed within them...