“After seven weeks of cities — the noise, the crowds, the bass and the moaning and the clatter of plates and the hiss of trains and the specific cacophony of a body being touched by strangers — the silence of the mountains was so total, so absolute, that I could hear the blood in my own ears. I could hear my own heartbeat. I could hear the difference between breathing in and breathing out, and the difference was enormous: the in-breath was the world entering me, the out-breath was me releasing the world.”