Giuseppe Bergman. Volume 3. Eastern Adventures

We set off for the East without charting any specific route or places we planned to visit. We vaguely understood that our small group of Western rationalists, steeped since birth in faith in technology and the empirical method of knowledge, was intruding into the territory of the irrational and metaphysical.
Perhaps we were trapped by the common notion that East and West are two complementary halves of a larger whole and arrive at the same conclusions, albeit along different paths: the West - through science, the East - through revelations.
Ideally, we should have completely surrendered to the journey, enjoying the sight of dusty roads stretching into infinity, and succumbing to the charm emanating from unfamiliar places.
We left Venice late in the evening with a complete disarray of thoughts: from now on, we were neither rationalists nor enthusiasts of technology.
Would we reach the East? Would we understand the East? Allah knows. We tried to prepare for the encounter with Indian civilization, creating the prerequisites for a constructive dialogue, relying on the mysticism living within us, on our spiritual essence, but not attaching ourselves to any specific religion. In reality, all this quickly lost its significance for us, for the roads covered by the dust of ages have their own charm, their shadowy and sunny zones, their secrets, enigmas, and mysteries.
Daily, we brushed up against the remnants of a distant past, from where sometimes a strange spark would flare up, only to extinguish itself, though it had managed to shake our confidence that we live in the best of worlds and that progress is synonymous with improvement. What is lost in the course of history sometimes deserves careful study.
On the way to the East, we still remained prisoners of the comic book and indulged in fantasies, honing our tools for further inquiries. In the comic book, everything is expressed through the metaphor of strokes and lines. It is based on an imaginary route, a memory of what never was.