Himalayas, March 1508
The pass above Nako is at four thousand meters and the air is thin enough that thinking requires effort. I have been in these mountains for three years. The monasteries receive me without excessive questions. The monks here are accustomed to the idea that a person might arrive from a great distance without a simple explanation for why.
I have been trying to write down what is happening to me. The journals from this period, when I read them later, will seem like the work of a man trying to describe color in a language with no color words. There are thresholds. There are teachers I meet in passing who leave no name. There are nights that listen back in ways I cannot account for. The pages contain these things in language that is not quite language. I do not know how else to set it down.
My body continues to change in ways that concern me. The grey has been spreading since I left Italy. It is nearly complete now. I look in still water and see a man decades older than the man who left Florence in 1492, though the calendar says only sixteen years have passed. The high cold and whatever lives in it are accelerating something I did not know was happening.
I am fifty years old by the calendar. I feel a great deal older. There is a monastery three days east. I have been told to go there. I cannot say who told me. The journals become fragmentary here. What they contain is mostly a question I did not know I was asking.