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Lina left her family library behind, except for three books about fellow voyagers: the Chinese poet Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza, the Portuguese Jewish philosopher exiled to the Netherlands, and Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher who, as as Jew, was forced to flee when the Nazis took power.

Du Fu, Baruch Spinoza and Hannah Arendt were all cast out of their communities by authorities who imposed narrow definitions of acceptable thought.

Among the dead, well, some of the most extraordinary “nature writing” I know is by Celtic monks from the eighth and ninth centuries, or Tang Dynasty wanderer-poets such as Li Bai and Du Fu.

Du Fu, translated here by Stephen Owen, excelled in describing the human cost of the Tang dynasty’s imperial ambitions, the suffering of individual soldiers who protected the Silk Road and defended the country’s distant borders: “Already gone far from the moon of Han, / when shall we return from building the Wall? Drifting clouds journey on southward at dusk; / we can watch them, we cannot go along.”

“For a hundred li,” Du Fu wrote, “you can make out the smallest thing.”