I finished re-reading Impossible Vacation yesterday. Sadly, there is still no sign of Spalding Gray. It's silly, but I had sort of hoped they would find him, one way or another, by the time I finished the book. Here are a couple of passages that grabbed me this time through:

"It was a cool, wet, beautiful Nordic day in June and everything was so fresh, but all at once I felt a chill creeping into my bones. I saw all the people again, all those Dutch people, and the realization crept into me, like the chill, that all of this had been going on without me: Amsterdam had been going on all this time, all this time that I was in India, all my life, and now I was just peeking in on it. Yes, all of Amsterdam - not to mention Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, or London - had been going on without me. And no one cared whether I came or went, no one cared what I did or felt; so my newfound freedom was turning into a horror. No one even knew I was in that cab or who I was, much less how I perceived the cauliflower or the upright Dutch women on their black Mary Poppins bikes." (p.125)

"But as soon as I'd get relaxed, all the ten thousand things would start entering my head again, the temptations that came like those wild and crazy birds flying at me, all those shoulds and woulds and coulds, which started now like an infernal engine in my head: shoulda-woulda-coulda. Maybe I should go to Bali, I thought, or maybe I would or could take a train down to Greece. Maybe I should go to Ireland. Then I'd order another beer to try to quench what now seemed like endless desire spinning in my head like a giant wheel of fortune. I sat there in that overripe place of desire and expectation, poised and teetering on the edge of a life not yet lived." (p.130)

"I was beginning to be aware of how my imagination was often more vivid and exciting than the actual experiences I had in the outside world, that the essence of my life was imagining the places I was not in." (p.223)