I am a solitary person, but my life is filled with my students and with the people and characters I have met in real life, in books - and in my imagination. I am seeking my Dark Lady, my muse, the place I will call home - the starting point of our many travels, both literal and imaginative.

I am an artist, and a reader. I love beautiful and difficult things.

I teach English literature at a university, and my passion is reading and drawing and being with people who are travellers like me.

Being myself, being alone, dreaming, teaching things that I love... reading. And listening to people.

My silence.

I love the classics - from Old English to Chaucer and Dante, to Shakespeare - and then a big leap across the centuries (via Sterne and Blake) to the Victorians (Dickens especially), and the Moderns. I am particulalry fond of Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and other Modernist poets and novelists. I don't really like reading stuff written after WWII except Sci-Fi and Fantasy literature (espcially Phillip K. Dick). So much contemporary fiction is simply reinventing the wheel, saying the same thing in ways that I do not find challenging or enlightening. I love Haldor Laxness, Dostoievsky, Jaroslav Hasek - so many - too many. One of my favourite books is the Oxford English Dictionary - the full version, with all the etymologies. Also read a lot of history - especially biography. Am tending more towards non-fiction as I grow up - though I always go back to story at the end of the day.

My all-time favourite movie is Tarkovsky's 'Stalker'. That says it all.

I listen to 'classical' music (Bach, Mozart, etc., though I detest opera - read some libretti and you'll understand why). I am big into piano concertos - especially the Russians (Rachmaninov, Shostakovitch...). As for pop music, I like mostly Indy and folk music, anything from Dylan onwards. Also groove to bluegrass, heavy metal, some New Age, and ambient trance. Most jazz sounds the same to me, but it'll do primarily because of the atmospheres it creates (dingy bars, loose women).

I love simple, whole food - especially if it comes from my own garden - a la Jamie Oliver. I go for Indian, Mediterranean, and Thai food, and am not really into 'sophisticated' dining. I cannot tell the difference between a pinotage and a merlot!

History, why things are as they are now, where they come from - and how long they have been in our collective consciousness. I also think about nature, about simplicity, about what makes people happy - and what makes them unhappy. Finally - these are my dark, despairing thoughts - I think a lot about what this planet will be like when we have destroyed it: what it will be like when the sun is our enemy, and not the source of our life and our energy - the time when the dark, cold places of the earth will be the new heaven.

Unwinding after a hectic week, generally home alone.

You are a traveller and a reader. You are filled with a gentle darkness, a silence resonant with voices of other worlds, and other possibilites for life and living (the imagination relies on quietness, on darkness). You are interested in nature - and human nature. You want to explore, but you also want to create a paradise to go home to, a place where you and yours can live in peace with themselves and others, fulfilling their whole potential.