But soon, and suddenly, this was so no longer.
Every human life spirals back on itself.
Like a book read first in adolescence and again at intervals, a formative early experience lies in wait, ever ready to yield up new personal meaning. What the French Revolution did to Hazlitt, my first trip outside the United States, to Haiti with my father at the age of sixteen, had done to me. The experience had earned me the audacity to take history personally. Having been to Haiti, no longer could I imagine that my world didn't include places like it. The pattern was set for my responses to places in Asia.