Even among thousands of gravestones, I never feel like I am visiting the dead. The relationship is always a personal one, even with poets who have been dead for as long as Virgil, Hölderlin, and Leopardi. They are part of my life because they have accompanied this life in the most diverse ways and at the most varied moments. Cees Nooteboom, who has traveled across continents and wandered through the worlds of literature, visits his "beloved dead" wherever he finds them to engage in dialogue with them, to assure himself of their words, their immortality. He has made pilgrimages to Neruda in Chile, to Stevenson in Samoa, and to Kawabata in Japan; to Keats and Shelley in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, the "Cemetery of Strangers," where Goethe's son and one of Wilhelm von Humboldt's sons are also buried; to Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and E.