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Our species believes that lonely pilgrimages have magical powers.
Anyway, I wanted to be alone with myself, he said.
A few weeks later, he reached her home and the two ate boiled fish together.
To her shock, a set of 2,052 directions appeared.
She printed out the 95-page document.
The universe had granted this navigational map from a vanishing world just once.
It was the last work I saw at the end of an eight-hour day of looking.
At first, I was bored by what appeared to be twee graphic design.
But the title was fantastic.
Frustrated, I wanted to see the journey all at once on one large surface.
I wanted to see a huge map tracking her proposed steps.
But artists have their own ways, and this elegant, odd summary diagram was all there was.
And when I started to pay attention, I was floored.
Wu is instructed to first head to Canada.
She exits Montana at Thompson Pass and hikes for hours along the Trail of the Coeur dAlenes in Idaho.
She heads into and across all of Washington State.
At this point, I was all-in.What a Whitmanesque trip, I thought.I want to do this.
My faith was broken and restored all at once.
After hiking Japan, instruction 2,015 says to swim across the Pacific Ocean to Taiwan.
The whole trip is at once real and crazy a mad labyrinth.
EvenWalking to Taipeis most ridiculous suggestions have some correspondence to reality.
The British Canadian adventurer John Beeden in 2015 rowed 7,400 miles across the Pacific Ocean.
In 2011, six people swam from Japan to Taiwan.
And in 1998, Ben Lecomte completed a 3,716-mile boat-supported swim across the Atlantic.
We make voyages like this, in Emily Brontes words, to bring the unreal world … strangely near.
But ifWalking to Taipeievokes feelings of awe, it is also a journey of no journey.
It is without the body.
It is a ghostly metaphysical message from cyberspace that almost whispers, You are not you.
You feel landlocked, trapped, claustrophobic.
