Driving to a friend's house on a recent evening, I was awe-struck by the sight of the full moon rising just above Manila rooftops, huge and swollen, yellow through the dust and smoke of the city. I stopped to watch it for a few moments, reflecting on what a pity it was that most city dwellers? Myself included? Usually miss sights like this because we spend most of our lives indoors.

　　My friend had also seen it. He grew up living in a forest in Europe, and the moon meant a lot to him then. It had touched many aspects of his life, including those concerning his ordinary daily life. For example, when he had to make sure that he had his torch with him when he was outside in the evening, or when the moon was due to rise late or was at its newest, a bright, distant sliver of white like a chink of light below a door in the sky.

　　I know the feeling. Last December I took my seven-year-old daughter to the mountainous jungle of northern India with some friends. We stayed in a forest rest-house with no electricity or running hot water. Our group had campfires outside every night, and indoors when it was too cold outside. The moon grew to its fullest during our trip. At Binsar, 7, 500 feet up in the Kumaon hills, I can remember going out at 10pm and seeing the great Manda Devil Mountain like a ghost on the horizon, gleaming white in the moonlight and flanked by Trishul, the mountain considered holy by Hindus. Between me and the high mountains lay three or four valleys. Not a light shone in them and not a sound could be heard. It was one of the quietest places I have ever known, a bottomless well of silence. And above me was the full moon.

　　Today our lives are defined by glass, concrete, metal, plastic and fibre-glass. We eat and breathe things our bodies were not designed to process. We have televisions, Xerox machines, cell phones, pagers, electricity, heaters and ovens and air-conditioners, cars, computers and remote controls.

　　Struggling through traffic that evening in Manila at the end of a tiring day, most of it spent indoors, I thought: before long, I would like to live in a small cottage in the Himalayas. There I will grow vegetables and read books and walk in the mountains. And perhaps write, but not in anger. I may grow old there, and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled and measure out my life in coffee spoons. But I will be able to walk outside on a cold silent night and touch the moon.