Dreaming of Distance

I fantasized at length of how it might be, to have enough money and single-mindedness to leave suddenly without explaining myself, go somewhere simple and clean, far from here, like the island of Kumlinge in the Baltic.

I saw myself in watery sunlight, divested of all obligations and connections, walking without luggage along a narrow road by a sandy bay, with sea thrift and gorse and a solitary pine, a road that rose to a promontory and a plain white country church…

...everything could be resolved in Kumlinge, where the air and light were pure.

  

                                - Ian McEwan (Sweet Tooth)