Through the medium of literature, his thoughts become involved with theirs, and with ours, and so the mind is not just left talking to itself in some rambling soliloquy, but rather engages in conversation. That, at least, is the illusion worked through the form of the personal essay. The art of conversation, as Dessaix says, is central to it, and Montaigne, generally acknowledged as its founder, was ‘a dazzling conversationalist’.

Conversation is very much on Dessaix’s mind in this collection. He reflects on the cultures of ideal conversation developed in the eighteenth-century coffee house and the literary salon, but also reviews the opinions of some sceptics: Thomas de Quincey, who compared conversational exchange to a tennis match in which the ball flies back and forth ‘to no purpose whatsoever’; Rousseau and Thoreau, who just wished people would stop interrupting their private commune with nature.

And then there are the cynics, who think that in a world of mobile phone communication conversation is dead anyway. Dessaix himself seems inclined to this view; with his comedic turns on the banalities of blogging, twittering, and instant phrase books for travellers, he sounds at times like a participant in Grumpy Old Men. ‘My Thai phrasebook tells me, for instance, how to say, “I’m crazed with desire, darling”, a phrase of limited use anywhere, I’d have thought, but in any case, if I were truly crazed with desire, then, depending on the where and the when of it all … Well, you see what I mean, surely.’ He likes to throw in these tongue-in-cheek conversational gambits. ‘May I speak frankly?’ ‘But, but, but, you will object – and I do take your point …’ Here, of course, he is being quite disingenuous. If a reader’s voice actually did by some telepathic process manage to interject, he probably would not like it at all.

‘As I was saying …’ We all know that gambit, don’t we? It’s the self-prompting of a monologist who has no intention of giving over the space of conversation to anyone else, even while taking a moment to change trains of thought. Here is where the essayist, like any other artist whose practice depends on the deft manipulation of our point of view, runs a risk. In these days of compulsive blogging, where every broadcast discussion has to provide a space for viewers or listeners to have their own say, it is especially risky to assume you have audience with a silent partner.

But Dessaix has his devoted listeners, and I admit to having been one of them since his time as host of Radio National’s Books and Writing program in the 1980s and 1990s. So what is it that persuades us to sit there, like people at a dinner party where only one guest is holding forth? After all, we wouldn’t be attending in the first place if we weren’t to some extent on the same wavelength, with some shared literary knowledge, travel experience, and philosophical reflections.

A degree of mesmerism is involved. The voice that sustains our attention has particular qualities of tone and inflexion. The rhythms of the language are like those of a brilliant dancer. Sinuous, attenuated lines unexpectedly turn back on themselves or are stopped dead in percussive flourishes. Dessaix is an assured entertainer on the page. There is erudition, wry insight, and self-deprecating charm. ‘In Damien Hirst’s words, “Sometimes I feel I have nothing to say, and that’s something I want to communicate.”’ Here and there you encounter a passage that would make prime script for a stand-up comic. Fundamentally, though, what holds us is the teasing promise that, through the weave of parenthesis and tangential narrative, all this rambling is going somewhere. But where?

Dessaix likes to travel. He recalls sitting in his tower, thinking of going to Damascus … ‘and then all of a sudden I upped and went’. Sometimes, he adds, you need a dose of enchantment. And when you journey in search of enchantment, the geographical transition you make is also a form of time travel. In Damascus, frames of the modern and ancient world alternate. The old city enchants with resonances of the Silk Road. The new city, suffocating under a dictatorship, has no charms. This dichotomy borders on cliché, and Dessaix knows it is a delusory impression, but there is something he is trying to learn from it.

He moves on to Alexandria, where he thinks about falling in love, and dwells on literary examples – Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster – of the visionary intensity with which personal romance can sometimes intersect with the romance of place. For John Middleton Murry, writing on Forster, it’s a case of encountering ‘a bend in the spiritual dimension, where the atmosphere is preternaturally keen’.

Somewhere on your travels through the world, maybe you will find yourself rounding this bend and, like the Owen Wilson character in Midnight in Paris, entering an atmosphere so vibrant it seems to cause the spontaneous generation of human genius. Every door you open leads into a room full of gifted artists and writers, whose conversation is on a mental plane unreachable in the normal world. Those who have read Dessaix’s Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004) may recognise the syndrome. It is the Grand Illusion, arising from a sense that there is something fundamentally banal about everyday existence. Time and again the illusion confronts him. In a hotel room in Vladivostok, he turns on the television and is ‘aghast’ to see on the screen Peter Cundall ‘the lovable talking garden gnome from Gardening Australia’. This prompts another Grumpy Old Man moment. ‘Nowadays … everywhere is just anywhere.’

If you are having a moment like that, and it kills off the impulse to take a plane to Damascus, you might instead pick up a collection of essays, and this one would do very well. When everywhere seems like just anywhere, a good essay can make it seem quite otherwise. The essay form itself, as only its truest practitioners understand, is an exercise in mental travel. It follows the movements of the mind – trains of thought, streams of consciousness, rambling associations – but does so with an awareness that most thought processes are circular. According to the common maxim, going round in circles is a way of getting nowhere, but some circles are spirals whose ends and beginnings relate to one another across a terrain that may, in the landscape of the mind, encompass all manner of things.