A pilgrimage isn't just a trip. It's an approach: going to a place as if you're visiting an oracle, curious about what it has to show you and what it stirs in you. I learned it from my mother, a history teacher with firm views on how not to look at a painting.

Days before we fly to England, I'm thinking about the crossings we choose: my husband's new decade, the Bayeux Tapestry, Canterbury, and a visit to my patron saint, Jane Austen, at her house in Chawton. I'm also thinking about the ones that ride along, like the two anniversaries that will find us there.

Eighteen years ago I wrote a thesis about romantic comedies as maps of the heroine's transformation, then set it down and went underground. This summer's solar eclipse brought it back up, along with the man who started all of it. Mr Darcy was the first character I couldn't explain my way out of, and following him led me somewhere I didn't expect: to a husband, back to making art, back to astrology, and eventually to eight figures I now call Threshold Lovers. What we return to isn't random.

At every crossing there is a companion who carries an erotic charge. Not necessarily because it will lead to a romantic encounter. Because desire is a potent compass, and more than that, desire is what moves the body toward making things take shape in the physical world. When a crossing is genuinely hard, the thing missing is almost never information. Most of us know exactly what we should do. We have the map, the advice, the framework, the three good reasons, and we sit in the chair another year anyway, fully informed and completely immobile. What is missing is appetite.