Draw the curtain, take out the slide projector, see the world.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, every few years or so, my mother would take out her grandfather’s color slides from his extensive travel in the 1940s, ’50s, and into the ’60s. Marcel Bizos, or Papy, as he has always been known to me, was not a tourist or an adventurer. Rather, he was a distinguished professor of Latin and Greek who had come to travel the world as an inspector of the French lycées abroad after World War II. We would project the slides on the wall of our Parisian apartment and marvel at the freshness of the colors, the novelty of the sights, several of them now rendered inaccessible to westerners because of war, global warming, or societal changes. Cue in a traditional horse-mounted Buzkashi game in Afghanistan, the mud mosques of Timbuktu. My parents’ comments provided rudiments...

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