Halpern's discreet essays about monks, prisoners, hermits, the ill, even a detective are all entertaining, but they do not rise to intellectual fruition. Unheard melodies can charm a moment and deceive one into thinking the unfinished profound, but they offer little lasting nourishment. She does not. Instead of pondering, she, as a latter-day romantic, refuses to analyze. Not even death, of course, frees the writer from words, neither his own nor those of others.
Youth is a handicap for the philosophic writer.
Halpern writes beautifully, but in this book, at least, she does not appear to have lived long enough to understand that understanding is extraordinarily difficult. Travel writers are usually solitaries, at least for the duration of their journeys. Although other people wander in from the margins and furnish the writer's pages with color and anecdote, they rarely become rounded characters influencing the course of the trip. Free to blow in the breeze, the traveler can nevertheless be a lightweight. Apart from family, writing can lack substance, all those rich inner burdens of domesticity.