Author Archives: Rambod

Break-in and Ski

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She startled me, far more than could be imagined just looking at her: a retired elementary school teacher, with big thick glasses and a tuft of cropped white hair. My hand was still on the handle of the back-door as I was trying to force it open; pants wet and muddy up to the knees; hair wet and matted to my head; unshaven; eyes bloodshot; a single track of footprints in the deep snow walking through the back of the chalet. Looks could be deceiving, to be sure, but there was no denying that I was trying to break into a $1.4 million chalet in the middle of a blinding blizzard.

“Can I help you,” she had asked, and repeated, after my initial startled grunt.

“The key was supposed to be under the mat, but I can’t find it,” I mumbled. “Er … The other guest must have taken it by mistake.”

There was no truth to the story, of course. But, in my defence, I did not know that then.

Most important lesson to remember: if you’re caught trying to break in, make sure you believe your own cover story.

Françoise, the kindly neighbour, was understanding. “Come on in, have some tea, and we will sort it out.” You invited a perfect stranger in for tea? Her son later asked.

And I did. I had no choice. The chalet was expertly locked – God knows, I had tried every window and both doors, the blinds, the shutters, and no give – and it was obvious, after twenty minutes in the cold checking every possible angle short of breaking down the door, that I could not get in without a key. Well, not without an accomplice. I was wet from the snow and sweat; the blizzard that had begun that morning was not letting up; I badly needed to pee.

So I went in, dried my hair, visited the loo, had a cup of tea, and told her my tale of woe.

I had just arrived from Canada. After waiting for the shuttle from the airport for a couple of hours, I managed to locate the driver who, being Swiss, had been maddeningly on time – that is, not early. The shuttle left me in a parking lot “around the corner” from the chalet. Some “corner”: 1.5 kilometers up the mountain, down the street and up the alley. In a blistering blizzard. With a ski bag, a backpack and a suitcase.

Françoise, the kindly neighbour, remembered me from days past. Samantha and I used to rent the chalet years ago; I had been there again only last year. And here I was again: at our old chalet, and no key. There as at least an air of plausibility to the unlikely story.

“That’s OK; even if we can’t find someone to open the chalet, you can sleep upstairs,” she said. You offered him my room – my bed? The son was beside himself.

The fire was roaring. We chatted about teaching, students, retirement, Canada, and the snow. I still could not get hold of Samantha. “Your pants are wet – my son is the same size as you, if you want to change. Can I make you something to eat?” You offered him my pants? The son was incredulous.

She poured me some more tea. Her warmth and hospitality were wonderful. The fire, and her kindness, reminded me of one of Iran’s greatest modern poems: Arash.


It’s snowing

Downy whiteness covers the cliffs

The mountains are silent; the valleys pining

Rocky pathways yearning for a passing caravan

Were there no smoke rising from lonely cottages

Or if a flickering fire did not bring a message of hope

What would one do in a despairing, bitter blizzard?

They opened the door to me

They opened their hearts to me

And soon I knew that around the crackling fireplace

A story was unfolding …


The fire was roaring; the tea was hot. After an hour, Françoise found a key and opened the chalet. You let a squatter into someone else’s chalet? Are you mad? The son almost called the police at that point.

As I walked in, Samantha called to tell me that … I was at the wrong place. She had not rented the old chalet this year; the new one was across town.

Still wet, more tired and less cold, I picked up the ski bag, the suitcase and the backpack, walked down the alley, down the street and up the mountain, and hailed a cab.

I did not have the heart to tell Françoise what had happened. Ran into her in the spa a week later; she told me about her son … we had a good hearty laugh. I felt like an imbecile. She treated me like the village idiot.

The skiing the next day, and for the days afterwards, was well worth the hassle. Lots of powder, not too many people; I skied hard the first day, which meant that my legs were like wet noodles the next two days. I took a day off, and tried an “easy” day after, but ended up skiing hard in any event. On the last day, the sun came out. The sky was gloriously blue; the slopes amazingly white; the mountains clear; the air crisp … three sneezes and a few sniffles later, I realised that skiing was out of the question. Or, it could be attempted, if I were willing to spend the next two weeks in bed with a fever. I sat on the sunny balcony and read a book instead. That afternoon I returned to Geneva.

This is the third time I was in Geneva in a year. One of the most amazing things about the place is, of course, not about the place at all, but about the people, and specifically, the friends I left behind: how each of them has managed, from year to year, to find new challenges, to move in new directions, to explore new paths. The city has stayed remarkably the same; my friends continue to grow, and change – for the better. Perhaps that is why we have stayed friends in the first place; that is why I keep wanting to go back – it is not the cheese fondue …

The return was a bit of a challenge. The half-sniffles turned into a full-blown cold; on arrival, I changed suitcases at home and took the train to Kingston to meet my students, and then off to Toronto for work. Now I’m back, recovered and refreshed. Hard to believe that just over two weeks ago I was caught trying to break into a Swiss chalet; two days after that, I was standing at 3000 meters, looking over a frozen Mont Gelé, snow-covered peaks and cloudy valleys; a week after I was having dinner at my favourite restaurants with close friends.


Mad Ludwig’s Castle

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“MINE!”

She stood there, arms raised in defensive posture; legs apart; tears streaming down her face.

“MINE!”

She cried again, as she defended “her” stuff (not yet bought; in the shopping cart) from the invader (a young boy twice her size, merely moving forward as the line moved ahead).

“Mine” is not a word that is used around my little niece Eliana at home, so it’s fairly easy to trace it to her interaction with other children at daycare. And we avoid the word for good reason: in context, it is a noxious thing to say. Especially in public. Especially to strangers.  Especially in respect of things that, well, you don’t even quite own yet.

But … the sheer courage of my little niece in standing up to the perceived attack on herstuff was remarkable. This was not a whiny, “mommy, Jack took my toy” kind of assertion of ownership; she stood there, all of 2.5 years old, arms up, determined to defend her stuff against perceived aggression by a much larger foe.

Another amazing moment in the life of my niece, who is the source of much of our amusement and enjoyment these days.

And another year gone by.

In some respects, this has been an uneventful year – the good sort (no illnesses; no disasters). Professionally, matters are calm (lost only one significant constitutional case; have not been fired yet); personally, things are quiet (no major trips; no serious announcements).

Since my Washington trip back in March, the only excursion worth noting was to Neuschwanstein. This is the famed cliff-top castle of the mad Ludwig of Bavaria that inspired Disney’s cartoonists and architects to come up with the turreted symbol of the company and to shape our collective idea of what a “fairytale castle” looks like.

Ludwig – whose brother died of madness and who was eventually sent to a sanatorium, where he perished (along with his psychologist) – had the original medieval cliff-top castle torn down so that he could build an, er, authentic one in its place, modelled and inspired, for additional authenticity, by Wagner’s operas. The castle looks magnificent and, indeed, “medieval” and “fairy-tale” like in its setting; it reminded me of all those “artist’s conception”s that we see of distant planets and gruesome murders: from the outside, it certainly looks like a XIX c. “artist’s conception” of what a medieval castle might look like new and, for that reason, it is beautiful and faintly reassuring.

Inside, it’s a different story. An entire floor was never finished (after Ludwig was committed, building stopped and the rest of the castle was turned into a museum); Ludwig’s room, covered in panelled and carved wood, took four years to finish; each major room has a different Wager opera motif. All of this is amusing, if mildly ludicrous, though neither remotely authentic nor aesthetically pleasing. I think all of the excesses of the castle, including the Wagnerian obsession, would have been easy to take and, in some measure at any rate, to admire, were it not for the pièce de résistance, the coup de grace, if you will: an indoor grotto. Yeah, really, including dripping fake stalactites. I always wanted to see the place; and I did. Proved yet again that listening to Wagner too much could be hazardous to your mental health.

And so it is – with a dubious artistic comment – that I bring to a close this note and my year.

 

Cherry Blossoms

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It's been a while since I last wrote.  The charitable explanation is that I have been sparing all of you from my long-ish travelogues.  It is certainly not for lack of affection or of attention.  I will refrain from any excuse other than that I have had much to say and not enough inspiration to put pen to paper, or electrons to pixels, and simply say it.  There there is the simple truth that after a lot of ups and downs, my life has been on a relatively even keel over the past two years, and so there has been little that has been exciting, or difficult, enough to merit a mass missive.

Even, but not uneventful. Eliana, my little niece, is a daily wonder and a constant source of entertainment, joy and hope. She will be two next week, though I am at a loss what to get her – she is a consummate little lady and does like the dresses her uncle buys … but, at her age, the dresses have a life of about two weeks – if that, and assuming she likes them.

I guess like most two-year olds, Eliana already has a mind of her own.  Nowhere was this more evident, and more symbolic, than at her Christening.  In the light of her half-Greek heritage, the ceremonies were held at a Greek Orthodox Church in Toronto.  She was remarkably well-behaved, taking the long ceremony in her stride.  I was not quite sure how she would react to the “I spit at Satan – now spit three times” business just outside the Nave – she is at the age to imitate everything – but I guess she must have thought that all the fuss and spitting and incense and candles and men dressed in funny attire and walking around tables and so on demonstrated a distinct lack of seriousness on the part of her parents and Godparents, and decided to let it all wash over her.  She took being slathered in oil without much complaint, and seemed vaguely amused when she was lowered into the basin.  But – and here is the critical, symbolic moment – when the priest pressed lightly on her shoulders to get her to sit in the basin, she resisted and then started crying.  No man – not even a priest in a House of God on her Christening – was gonna get her to do something she did not want to do.

Aside from domestic affairs, work and life have been steady, exciting and enriching in equal measure.　

On the personal side, since I last wrote to all of you, I have been to Philadelphia (visiting the Barnes Collection), Turkey (Istanbul and Bodrum), Rome (for work), Switzerland, Austria and German (over the holidays), the Canadian Rockies, and DC (just came back; for the Cherry Blossoms).  I will, eventually, record and relate impressions of each in due course. (Just when you thought you had had enough of these ….)

Work is going well.  There is something quite exciting about working in a Finance Ministry – a G7 and a G20 Finance Ministry – in the middle of a global crisis.  At a minimum, one learns a great deal.  More on that later.

The Two Saints

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Canterbury Cathedral is one of the oddest churches I have set foot in.  It is split almost neatly in half by an inside wall and a tiny door, with the main tower presiding over the split.  On one side is the nave, a rather conventional early Gothic three-aisle hall for the faithful.  Ordinarily, the nave would be crossed by a transept (to make the sign of a cross), with a choir to follow, all in a relatively open space, so that the faithful could observe the Church rituals, the priest nibbling on the flesh of Christ and lustily quaffing his blood, the choir singing, etc.  The oddness of Canterbury is that the nave stops at an imposing set of stairs and a door, beyond which, behind massive stone walls, the Illuminati and the singers and the church leaders would sit and perform the rituals, removed from the riff-raff, it would seem.  Even with the door open, the altar cannot be seen from the floor of the main church, thus imposing a barrier between the priest and the commons that is far more formidable than the much grander and much more imposing St. Peter's in Rome.
 
My fascination – voire obsession – with churches Gothic and things English was not, however, the main reason that took me to Canterbury; discovering the odd architecture was a side-benefit.  I'd gone there on a non-believer's pilgrimage of sorts: to visit the shrine of St. Thomas Becket, to get a better sense of this most towering of the Archbishops of Canterbury and a fascinating figure in English history, a man who is responsible (directly and indirectly) for some of the most interesting rituals of modern politics. 
 
Becket was chancellor to Henry II Plantagenet, about whom I have written elsewhere.  In their youth, they had been drinking and whoring buddies; as Chancellor, Becket continued to have a close relationship with Henry.  So close, in fact, that when the post of Archbishop became open, Henry, hoping for a compliant church, nominated his buddy for the position of its leader. (You can see that Bush's appointment of his cronies to high posts has a long provenance; although, of course, none could be compared to Becket in depth of character or of faith.) Becket, a dissolute rich chancellor, suffers an overnight transformation on elevation to the post of Archbishop.  This is not quite a Damascene conversion, but certainly a startling one.  The good friends – the King and Becket – have a falling out; Becket runs away to Europe, hiding in some Abbey in France; the Pope excommunicates Henry; the first real Church-State crisis in England begins in earnest.
 
None of which is remotely relevant to why I was interested in Becket, or why you should be.  Rather, the story involves a “problem to communicate“*, a Murder in the Cathedral** and public flagellation.  With a mix like that, how could you go wrong?
 
So where were we?  Oh yeah.  Becket in France; Henry excommunicated. 

Henry caves and Becket returns to England as head of the English church.  It was a difficult pill for Henry to swallow – what, with his wife (the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine) raising an army in civil war, his ego bruised and Becket back in England scheming, Henry was boxed in on all sides.  One night, after a hearty mill and a little more alcohol than prudent, Henry blurts out, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”  His drinking buddies take him at his word – four of them get up, ride to Canterbury and kill Becket on the steps leading to the altar.  It is not known whether they were above the drinking limit for riding.
 
Well, you can see the cinematic possibilities immediately.  Or an episode of “Law and Order”.  The knights claimed they were following orders – anticipating the Nuremberg trials by about eight hundred years; Henry's defence was, “I didn't mean murder!”  Twinkies not having been invented, no one thought of the Twinkie defence.***  Bad business, all around.  Eventually, the King and the Church arrived at a compromise, the effects of which you can see to this day: the public apology and the shaming of the leader.  For Henry not only apologised, but actually walked barefoot to the Cathedral, stripped to his waist and got flagellated by the monks as penance for his intemperate outburst that led to the death of his former best friend.  Every time you see a politician come on TV to apologise for a moral blunder, you can thank Henry for having set the pattern.  And the effects were electrifying: with the church now on his side, Henry defeated Eleanor and imprisoned her for the next ten years; he managed to rule for another fifteen after the death of Becket and built the foundations of the English common law and the judiciary.   
 
There is, of course, one other point to this story. 

Becket's inflexibility in defence of the Church is, in our age, open to two divergent interpretations.  This, after all, was the Church that had, by 1170, launched two Crusades and was hardly a model of moral probity.  And Becket, a former English Chancellor, was giving precedence to what was in effect a foreign Church over the interests of his King and Country.  This same blind faith we see today, not only in the throngs of Muslim agitators and protesters, but in Hindu attacks on Muslims and in Fundamentalist Christian demonstrations in the US.  It is at once terrifying and comforting that Henry was as perplexed by all of this nine hundred years ago as we are now.  But that is only a negative way of looking at what was, for Becket at any rate, a positive and life-affirming force.  Becket's philosophical stance was in favour not just of the Church as a political organisation, and not of faith against reason, but of faith as foundation for hope – in an age marked by wretchedness for the masses and excess for the rulers.  His act of faith on the steps of the Canterbury Cathedral was, within that framework, a courageous stand against tyranny: the tyranny of a king who could get, by an ambiguous utterance, four knights in armour riding hard all night to kill an aged and defenceless priest at the altar of his own church.  I mean, if he could do that and get away with it, what else would he be able to get away with?
 
Some three-hundred and fifty years later, another inflexible Thomas, Sir Thomas More, also lost his life to the tyranny of an English king.  He too was defending a church that, by the middle of the XVI c., had lost all claim to moral or political leadership.  And yet, More stood up and, asked to make a oath that he could not sustain in his conscience, said, “No”.  The king, Henry VIII, removed More's head and leveled Becket's shrine – the latter act filled with symbolism – and proceeded to die of syphilis, his body bursting with pus upon his deathbed.
 
The Catholic Church sainted both men.  I prefer to think of Becket and More, however, as secular saints, the progenitors of the protections we enjoy today against the power of the State to whose overwhelming might we are subject no less than the serfs were five hundred or a thousand years ago.  This is why I made my pilgrimage to Canterbury.  For every time a citizen raises his or her voice against Power, against injustice, and forces a political leader to march barefoot to a public flagellation – even if metaphorically – we can thank the intemperate outburst of a drunken king and the inflexibility of a frail churchman, Thomas à Becket.  
 
* The line is from “Cool Hand Luke”; couldn't find my note book with my original thoughts ….
** This one is a play; see above.
*** Thirty years ago, Dan White, a San Francisco city councilman, killed the mayor of San Francisco.  He argued that he went insane eating too many Twinkies, hot dogs and other junk food.  The defence was successful.

The Highlander

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To paraphrase Tolstoy (who wouldn't?), “all great movie lines are alike; each terrible line is bad in its own way.”  There are, in my my movie memory, five lines that outdo all others in the awfulness of delivery and content; each is uniquely bad, such as to belong to its own class; there need to be seminars to study just how the mind of man (or woman) could come up with such horrors, and how the mouth of man (or woman) could utter them.  Entire brigades of psychologists should be unleashed upon the world to study why it is that we, the watchers and movie-goers, sit there passively and do not react when assaulted – nay, battered – with these insults to the English language, the art of acting and the craft of movie-making.  These five worst lines are, in no particular order (points for naming the movie; bonus points for naming the actor; gift certificate for a therapist near you if you name the writer/director):

 
35. “It's raining?  I didn't notice.”
d)  “Love means never having to say you're sorry.”
MCML: “Hoo-Ha.”
** “I'm Connor McLeod, of the clan McLeod, of Planet Zeist.”
H: “Then it begins.”
 
(Confused by the numbering?  I told you, “in no particular order”.)
 
Of these, one in particular stands out: not just because it was atrocious, but because it was gratuitously so; and not just because it destroyed a movie, but because it laid waste to a concept. 
 

The Highlander was an odd gem of a movie.  Christopher Lambert – a Frenchman playing a Highland Scot with a bizarre accent – belonged, in the movie/concept, to a race of Immortals who were given the promise of Reaching the Great Mystery of the Universe (and thereby Becoming at One with the Great Mother Earth and All Animals in the Kingdom of Nature) if they could behead every other immortal and remain the last one standing.  The concept was hokey, to be blunt, and the storyline had more holes in it than a Scottish Golf Course beset by a battalion of moles.  But here was something endearing, and highly entertaining, in the innocence and earnestness with which the movie tackled the Grand Themes of Life.  Then the sequel came out, almost literally from another planet, and ruined the whole thing.

 
Almost the whole thing, for there was one thing that the second movie, the one from planet Zeist, could not undo, and it was the scenery of the original.  The Scottish Highlands.  Whether or not the movie was actually filmed there was immaterial; once I saw the movie, the damage was done.  I fell in love with Scotland – an image of Scotland – and the Highlands, and it took me well-nigh two decades to finally make it there in person.  And to fall in love again, this time not with an image but with the real thing.
 
Edinburgh

We landed in Edinburgh Airport in mid-morning (sunny) one early August day.  Got the car and drove for an hour to Rosslyn Chapel, one of the architectural gems of Scotland.  Upon arrival at the Chapel (driving rain and howling wind) you notice how small it is.  This is not a Gothic monster like the Köln Cathedral and there is no pretense that you are going to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the thing.  Like a nouvelle cuisine dish in a snooty French restaurant, Rosslyn Chapel is a little delicacy to be savoured rather than an all-you-can-eat monster to be gulped down.  Practically the entire interior is carved; one column alone took an apprentice master mason three years to complete (while the mason was away looking for a piece of granite or other stone for the same column; when the mason came back, he was not terribly happy that the work had already been done …).  A masterpiece and a must see (the column, certainly; and the Chapel as a whole).  An hour later we walked out (sunny with cloudy periods) and lunched at the village.  After lunch (driving rain) we got into the car and drove to Edinburgh.

 
Edinburgh, in my view, is one of the loveliest cities in Europe; the Royal Mile is the prettiest street in all of Britain, and probably one of the prettiest Miles in all of Europe.  The buildings are not grand or especially old; but there is a harmony in the place that is at once impressive and comforting.  Our first destination after Rosslyn was Edinburgh Castle. (Sunny again; getting whiplash from the constant change in the weather.)  From below, the Castle, perched as it is on a rock in the middle of the city, looked mighty imposing.  You half expect a labyrinth of dungeons and dank walls when you get there.  Dungeons there certainly were, at some point; and some of the walls were kind of grimy.  But I found the Castle itself (not terribly old, by European Castle Standards – there is an EU Commission Regulation that forbids a castle to be called “old” if it was built after 1453 – the official end of the Middle Ages – but the Brits got an exemption.  Anything built before the Blair Era is now considered “old”, to contrast with Blair's Cool Britannia.) quite charming.  Then again, perhaps it is the romantic in me: “Here is where Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary Queen of Scots, dragged her Italian tutor out of the chambers of the Queen and had him stabbed 53 times.” “This is where Lord Darnley was arrested by the Scots Lords and committed to the scaffold for treason.” “This is where Mary Queen of Scots last saw her one year-old son, before he was taken from her, and she was handed by the Scottish nobles to the English to be beheaded.”  And so on.  Such delicious tragedy.
 
Dinner was something of a challenge.  We had heard much about the Scottish culinary experience – deep fried Mars bars and all – and then there was the fact that we were in Edinburgh in the middle of the Fringe Festival.  Between the tourists, the (then) low Canadian dollar and the deep-fried pizza, we risked not just the wallet but the functioning of our arteries.  So we set out to look for restaurants off the beaten path.  Past “The Cock and the Spigot”, we stumbled upon “The Broken Bone”, a vegetarian nouvelle cuisine place (“Asparagus and Pistachio Quiche”, “Puff Pastry with Grapes and Peanut-Butter”).  I am not especially lacking in culinary courage – anyone who has had Belgian Eel in Green Sauce or Sweet and Sour Duck Tongues is certainly one for food experiments – but my courage failed at mention of “Coriander Tofu”, and we moved on to the next restaurant (“The Diddling Dick” or “The Crack and the Skull”, I forget), where we had an overpriced but reasonably edible dinner.
 
Oban and environs

After two days in Edinburgh we set out to explore.  The first two days we were planning a literary tour of Scotland.  Our first stop was Loch Lomond.

 
Yes, indeed, the Loch Lomond.
 
Our second stop – what's that?  You can't place the literary significance of Loch Lomond?  Exasperated sigh, roll of the eyes … You do realise that you are the only one on this list who does not know the enormous literary significance of Loch Lomond.  Because of a single, solitary reader, I have to break the flow of my email and explain it all.  Well, not all; at least some.  I ask the other readers to excuse you.
 
Loch Lomond, to make a long story short, is the favourite Scotch of Captain Haddock.
 
So where were we? Yeah, my lit-
 
What, you don't know who Captain Paddock, er, Herring, er, Haddock is?  And I suppose next you tell me that you have no idea where Marlinspike Hall is, or who is the world-renowned Professor Cuthbert Calculus? The Milanese Nightingale?  Dupont?  Or, to be precise, Dupond?
 
(My apologies to the rest, but there is this one reader who is, evidently, out to lunch ….  So here it goes.) 
 
Some say that the most significant Belgian export is chocolate; others might mention rank corruption; one or two would suggest EU regulations and other red tape.  But of course, all of that pales in comparison to the Graphic Novel, and more specifically, Tintin.  Written by a cryptofascist anti-Semite and evincing, on occasion, a rude racism, the Tintin chronicles nevertheless demonstrated a remarkable eye for social and political commentary.  There was, of course, quite a lot of fluff (“The Black Island”, which takes place in Scotland, was on its face about counterfeit operations, but it was really about a gorilla in a castle), but many of the books dealt with real problems: The Blue Lotus addressed Japan's invasion of China on trumped-up charges (when no one in the West was willing to talk about it); Tintin in the Land of the Soviets exposed Stalinism even as such luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre were still singing the praises of the Soviet regime; in Tintin in America there is a clear condemnation of the treatment of Native Americans, and so on.  Besides, Hergé, the author, spun a good yarn.  And that's why Loch Lomond, the captain's whiskey, stayed with me all these year, not to mention the Scottish castle where the gorilla lived (long story). 
 
So … back to the literary tour of Scotland, and Loch Lomond.  Lovely loch (it was sunny); great vistas; beautiful area.  From there, we went to Inverary Castle (clouding over), the home of the Duke of Argyll.  The Duke is a dashing fellow; his house looks great on the outside.  Inside, it had a musty smell, frayed 17th c. furniture and tapestry, and some stuff belonging to Rob Roy (an outlaw by English standards, he was a Scottish hero).  The castle looks a lot older than it is; and looks a lot better from the outside than inside.  From there, off to a bed and breakfast in the outskirts of Oban, of whiskey fame.  Angus on the hoof were grazing outside the window; sheep stopped and stared as we walked past the pastures (by this point, in driving rain); dinner was excellent; breakfast the next day, as the official Guide to Scotland reassured us, was “highly original, reflecting the character and the culture of the owners.”  In the case of this B&B, the owners were from Birmingham, so we got bangers and mash.
 
Our fourth day was spent mostly on the road; we were to complete the literary tour with a visit to the castle that had inspired the castle in The Black Island and with an attempt to find the Harry Potter bridge and steamtrain.  The Harry Potter bridge – better known as the Glenfinnian Viaduct  – is hidden in a valley behind the Glenfinnian Monument.  There is really no sign to tell you how to find the place.  Entirely by chance, we stopped at the monument after a drive in Scottish back country (sunny); we stopped at the monument for coffee (rain) and decided to walk up the vantage point (in mud, slipping and sliding up the hill) to get a better look at the loch (driving rain and sleet).  Mission Accomplished, we headed back to the car to continue the journey (the clouds had passed by now and the sun had returned).
 
The Hebrides and the Highlands

The road ended, literally, in Mallaig, where (under a massive rainpour) we saw the Harry Potter train and caught the ferry over to the Isle of Skye.

 
I had first read about the Inner Hebrides in two small books setting out the account of Samuel Johnson's journey to the Highlands and the Scottish Isles (there is Johnson's version, and also Boswell's immensely more entertaining retelling).  There is a lot of romance attached to the Hebrides in Scottish lore, especially to Skye, because this is where Bonnie Prince Charles, the pretender to the English and Scottish thrones, was spirited to in maid's clothing by Flora Macdonald after his ignominious defeat at the Battle of Culloden Hill.  This was the last Jacobite attempt to reclaim the British throne from the Hanoverians, installed in London since 1714 by Britain's Protestant elite.  By all accounts, Charles was a brave man, though much like his father and grandfather, thoroughly misled, both about the times and about his own support in the British heartland.  The pages of history are filled with such characters and at each retelling, especially from a distance, the “romance” of their doomed projects becomes that much more appealing.  As we drove on a single track road in the desolate wilds of Skye, the thought that came to my mind was this: what foolishness to leave Rome, to come to this barren island, to hide in flea-infested beds for months, to run from Royal agents and “traitorous” subjects in a maid's outfit … and for what?
 
Johnson was an admirer of the Stuarts, more out of conservative attachment to tradition than any liking for the mad line of Mary Queen of Scots (she's always in the background; her grandson, like her, lost his head to ambition; her great-grandson was deposed, and his son, the Bonnie Prince, demonstrated the same bad judgement as Mary.  Ran in the family, I guess.).  The problem of history, and of modern times, is that there are always Bonnie Prince Charleses around, rising for one lost cause or another; in their mad pursuit of madder ambition, these characters emit a sort of romantic radiance; some, like Johnson, regard, admire and dismiss; others, however, follow, and therein lies the danger.
 
From Skye we pressed on to the Highlands, where we were to spend two wonderful days.  The first day we went to Applecross along the coastal “scenic” route.  Or the coastal “suicide” route.  Single-track road; mountainous terrain; no guardrails along the road; sheep dozing on the warm asphalt; Dutch and German extra-wide caravans barrelling down at Autobahn speeds towards you; hills and peaks and gullies and streams rising and falling from every direction; rain and sleet and fog and blinding sun in random succession …  In Applecross we walked through a “Spruce Forest”, which was more of a clear-cut because of a storm-and-regeneration plan (storms cleared the place of trees that had not been native to the country; the local authorities allow local flora to return but keep foreign trees out); all along the pathway there were chives and wild mint and thistle and wasps – I might as well have stayed in my garden, except of course that I would have missed the clear-cut and the sheep droppings.  We had lunch at a charming little restaurant called The Potting Shed; you eat pretty much whatever it is that they grow in the garden (even the bread is made of rye grown on the grounds), so it gives you a healthy, virtuous feeling, which you need after you part with £9 for lettuce and goat cheese salad.  On the way back, we drove through a massive bowl on a single-track switch-back … the views were stunning – not that I was paying attention, as keeping my eyes (and the car's wheels) on the road required all my attention and nerves.

On the second day in the Highlands we went north, to Loch Maree, a favourite of Queen Victoria's (for what it's worth) and one of the most spectacular vistas we saw in a land of spectacular vistas.  As I write this, I am conscious of the fact that the superlatives tend to tumble one on top of the other and thus lose their force.  At the same time, I wish to underline the context from which I had gone to explore the Highlands, and I want you to see the superlatives in that light.  Switzerland, after all, and Geneva in particular, is all about lakes, mountains, spectacular views and relatively unspoiled nature.  Evidently, the Swiss country is not as wild or barren as the Highlands, but leaving that aside, in principle, the sight of lakes and mountains and winding roads and valleys was not one with which I was unfamiliar.  And yet.  And yet, Loch Maree was captivating.

We were in Scotland, in the Highlands, and it stands to reason that we should visit Loch Ness.  From Shieldagh, we drove on to Inverness, which is at the Northern tip of the famous loch.  Inverness is aggressively ugly – you have to question the sanity of a city council that would allow three massive concrete blocks to block the view of the charming Inverness Castle from the firth (river outlet into the sea).  And you have to really wonder about the Scottish Tourist Board's mental stability when you see their promotional posters plastered all over the concrete buildings: there is an “artist's rendition” of a thistle, with the motto: “Live it.  Travel Scotland.”  Live “it”?  What's “it” exactly?  A thistle?  Live the life of a prickly purple pest?  Travel Scotland like a weed?  The dangers of dangling pronouns, of meaningless mottoes, of bad planning.

Stirling Castle

After lunch we headed to Loch Ness; it was foggy and after a cursory attempt at seeing the monster, we gave up and went to a Scotch distillery instead.  At Dalwhinnie.  Twinned with Las Vegas.  The village, not the distillery, though for all practical purposes they were the same … Any way, obligatory tour of a distillery over (and not a Scotch fan and don't even want to “acquire” the taste), we pressed on to Stirlingshire, where we were to spend the next two days.

 

The drive through the interior took nearly the whole day.  It was raining, and when the rain stopped, the fog would descend.  Gray skies, gray road, no visibility, endless talk radio in Gaelic – even Simon the GPS had fallen silent because of the monotonous road – and the mind of the driver begins to wander.  In my specific case, under the circumstances, you begin to notice road signs – and in Britain, these are remarkable indeed.  This is a Nanny State run amok; a nation in permanent state of toilet training.  Every fifty meters or so there is a sign instructing you to do something, to refrain from doing something, or to pay attention to one thing or another.  And we are not talking about “keep right” or “look left”, but signs that tell you, for example, “Don't cause frustration; give way to faster cars” – I'm not kidding about this one. 

And then there are the cameras.  Every nook and cranny of the country has a closed-circuit camera watching over you – or, at any rate, watching you.  For me at least, the constant surveillance was a permanent invitation to petty mischief: you are almost driven to pick your nose in front of the camera, or scratch your balls – zippers open – every time you walk into an elevator.  And you think of ways of being more aggressive without inviting the police to do a cavity search.  What if the cc cameras had sound recording capability?  Why, that would almost demand letting rip a loud fart or a belch; let them install smell-detectors, and I'd be eating beans by the cartload to oblige.

While I'm in full rant mode, let me remark on that other famous British custom: the fact that they do not charge for their museums.  It is true, of course, but utterly irrelevant when you are a tourist.  For, to enter any other tourist tra- I mean, attraction, you are required to pay an arm and a leg, and a liver, and a few feet of your small intestines, for the privilege.  If there is a ruin in the country, there is a stand to drain blood from tourists.

Doune Castle is one example.  Famous principally for housing the first Duke of Albany (who?) and being one of the sites for Monty Python and the Holy Grail (now you're talking), the castle consists of three rooms, a turret and a scrubbed kitchen; you can't even walk on top of the walls.  And for the pleasure of seeing where John Cleese and Eric Idle traipsed around in drag, you pay £4 a head.  Stirling Castle was more imposing – at £12 it better have been, though the staff was decidedly grumpier than any other place we had been to in Scotland.  As for the Castle itself – well, there is a lot of history to the place, which was undergoing extensive renovations.  Apparently, in the course of ripping open the innards of the Castle, the workers had come across some interesting oddities.  Evidently helped by a team of spinners and communication experts, the Museum Board was trying to get as much mileage out of the construction and these oddities as possible.  My favourite: “Mysteries of the Palace”.  One whole series of posters was on how one of the beams in the roof is at a 45 degree angle and it is not clear how the roof was attached to it. (Collectively after me: “Ooooh, aaaaah.”) Another series of posters explored the deep mysteries of a door that may have led to a staircase in the garden. (“Just use your imagination”, the guide helpfully added.) I tried,oh I tried, but with the floors covered in plywood and the ceiling ripped open, with inane signs telling me about the mysteries hidden in the angle of the support beams, and with the guide exhorting me to exercise my imagination about a door that may or not have led to a garden, it was hard going.  I just was not sure exactly why I had paid twelve quid to visit a construction site to “use my imagination”.  If you are planning on visiting Stirling, make sure the flooring is done.  Or wait for the movie.

After that, we had one more day and night in Edinburgh.  And then back to Geneva for two more days, before the definitive end of my posting.

For the time being, you should not expect any more travelogues.  I have one trip planned to New York – a weekend thingy – and a ski trip back to Switzerland.  Not terribly exciting.  Next summer … who knows?  In the meantime, keep warm, and keep looking at the stars.

An Early Frost

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This is North America and so there is neither irony nor symbolism in this title.  An Early Frost refers to, well, the season's first frost this morning.  And the first frost is of immediate interest to because, as I was walking on the wooden footpath of the early 20th century bridge that connects my apartment to my work (or rather, the portion of the city in which my apartment is found, and the other side of the river, where I work), I kept slipping and nearly broke my neck several times.  Naturally, the opportunity to regale you all with my footpath adventures was too good to pass up on, and so here I am, and here you are, and there we go, and then there you are.  Where was I?
 
Ah yes, the footpath.  At first, when I started slipping on the splintered wooden planks, I thought maybe I had stepped into dog-poo.  But then, I wondered to myself, this is Ottawa, people clean up after their dogs.  True (slip), the footpath was dangerously frosted over (slip, slip), it was uneven (slip), the planks were sharded and splintered (slip, slip); and true, not even  in Brussels, the land of the unkempt pavements, had I (slip) ever walked on something this badly maintained (slip) – not to mention that there was never any frost in Brussels (slip, slip).  BUT, unlike Brussels, this was only frost and not dog-poo (slip); people here are civilised (slip); they clean up after their dogs (slip, slip, SLOP, slip).  Except when they don't (step, slop, step, slop, wipe, wipe).
 
Luckily the accident happened at the end of the footpath, as I turned onto the gravelled walkways of the Canadian Museum of Civilisation (le musée canadiennes des civilisations, in French, “civilisation” apparently multiplying when migrating from one language to the next) on the last stretch of my walk to work.
 
Work.  It's going really well.  Learning a lot about an interesting subject; I work with great people and have a wonderful boss. (She's one of the addressees, what else can I say?) It's just a daily blessing that despite my utter ignorance of the subject matter (which does NOT, of course, stop me from offering my views on anything and everything that inches past my offices) and general lack of organisation (the less said about this the better – suffice it to say that I have three task-books and ticklers set up to remind me of stuff, and still I forget), I have yet to be fired.  There are advantages, I suppose, to working for the Government 😉 …. 
 
What I really ought to be fired from is as a tenant in my own apartment.  I mean, honestly, the place is a disgrace.  For the first three weeks, my excuse was that I had 200 boxes (of which 30 were books, cds or dvds) crammed in a 75 sq.m. apartment, and that even getting the opened boxes out of the apartment was a challenge, let alone opening them and organising their contents.  This was the period when the slightest unplanned move in the apartment could result in a veritable avalanche of books, skis, rolled-up carpets and, in one memorable occasion, a box filled with expensive Scotch (which ought to have been drunk at my “empty the larder” party … but that is a different story).  Any way, luckily I survived the boxes full of books; now I have towering stack of books and dvds all around the apartment that, though unsightly and potentially messy, at least are not a death hazard.
 
Then there is the bedroom.  It is large-ish (I mean, it fits more than a bed and a dresser, which is what I used to have when I lived in Ottawa) and quite airy.  I have two large windows facing the US Embassy, which basically means that I have something like fourteen telezoom cameras, three marines, two parabolic dishes and an automated anti-Missile system aiming more or less directly at my bed.  The poor schmucks who have been assigned to Ram-Bed duty have got to be the luckiest bastards alive, for two reasons.  First, if it were not for me, they would likely be keeping watch over the Green Zone Wall in Baghdad; and second, their “daily rushes” (I'm guessing that is what their daily “intelligence reports” are called) are probably filled with four-letter words, such as “nada”, “null”, “void”, “bord” – OK, I'm stretching the point – and the like. 
 
Any way, I have to confess that I feel quite safe knowing that I am watched over by so many eyes.
 

The Return of the Lawyer

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It's been two weeks (and fifteen hours and thirty-three minutes) since my return to Ottawa, and two weeks (and fourteen hours and twenty-two minutes) since the basic elements of this email fell into place. That I have not yet been able to put my thoughts to paper – paper … how quaint! – is due as much to the ever-useful “I have been busy” trope as to sheer mental laziness, spiced with a hint of my unsettled life in a new job while staying at a hotel (waiting for the apartment to become available).

I'm back in my home and more-or-less native land (for the uninitiates, this is an allusion to Canada's national anthem. The English version. The French version refers to “porter la croix“, which isn't really my thing. I digress.) and waiting for the culture shock to hit. I suspect it will, sometime around February 10; but for now, the charms of Canada's National Capital Region are mitigating the disorienting impact of not having the Alps and the Jura and Lake Geneva all around me. Ottawa in summer is beautiful, active and busy. My daily walk to work takes me alongside Parliament and across the Ottawa river, and from our offices we have an unbroken view of the entire valley – the Gatineau Hills to the left being the only bumps in an otherwise unbroken flat horizon of green and gleaming water.

There are good restaurants – better than I recall – and passable cafés here and there; grocery stores are big and offer a bewildering variety of choice to someone used, in his daily shopping, to the Migros or the Coop around the corner. The fresh fruit and vegetables do not taste of anything, to be sure, and while cheap, the quality of much of the food leaves something to be desired; but these are minor quibbles – unless you live on a farm in Italy you are not going to get tasty tomatoes and so there is no point in dwelling on it. What you miss in terms of taste and quality, you gain in terms of choice, and that, at least, is something.

(Not all is bleakness on this front. I have waited four years to indulge in my biggest Canadian vice, the Liberty yoghurt – at 8% fat, it is certainly not “diet”, and as it comes only in 500 gram tubs, it positively invites gluttony. That and President's Choice Butter Cookies. And Tim Horton's plain donuts. And large juicy steaks.)

The greatest bonus of being back? I'm still size 32 in pants and have regressed to being “small” in Ts and shirts. At some point in the distant past, size 32 indicated a 32″ waist. I suspect it still does in some parts of the world. Not here, apparently – at least, no longer. Despite the fact that almost nothing I owned four years ago fits me and that I am at least five kilos heavier than in 2003, miraculously I have remained the same “size” here in North America. Now isn't that a boost to my ego. There is more. In Europe, I gradually began changing over to “large” in some clothes. Not here; I used to be a Medium, but five kilos and four years of gym later, I have regressed to Small. Oh joy. Now I can really enjoy my Liberty yoghurt.

So these are the positives, and for my own sake – not to sound too Pollyanna-ish – I have to linger on these before mentioning, in passing, the less salutary aspects of my return. The Return: aye, there's the rub.

I leave aside, for the moment, the grander philosophical question of whether one can ever “return” anywhere, unless of course one limits the meaning to the physical “go back” rather any deeper notion of “recapture”. For I am “back” in Ottawa only in the sense that I used physically to live here: but I am not back, because I am not who I was, and Ottawa is not what it was, when I left. We are discovering each other anew … but, I will leave this point for moment.

But on to the physical journey back.

So far as I have been able to gather from years of reading and travelling and “self-improvement”, there are three types of hell: the Hell Divine, the Hell Human, and the Hell in limbo.

The Hell Divine is your usual, run of the mill fire and lava and brimstone and impaled bodies, devils prodding sinners with tridents, Satan chomping on traitors, home od sodomites and fornicators and usurers and popes or other divines of various persuasion kind of thing. This is the hell of Dante, of St. Paul, of Zoroaster. The smell of sulfur. You get the picture. Even for an Arnie-admirer like myself, this is too strong a picture – somewhat unsubtle one might venture to add, a tad overwrought, a pinch too much. I like my hell a bit more elegant, if you will.

Well, leave it to an ugly toad with crooked teeth, bulging eyes, a sulfur breath and a predilection for mass murder to devise an understated though far more troubling hell, the Hell Human. In what must be the only line in his massive outpouring of Mots – the cognoscenti among you will have guessed who our hellish author is – that does not concern himself, Jean-Paul Sartre (the self-same toad with attitude) described hell as other people. (Mind you, it is possible that in this, as in much else, he was plagiarising his long-suffering companion Simone de Beauvoir. L'enfer, c'est les autres she might have sighed as Sartre brought yet another left-bank waif into their matrimonial home to pork, with Simone the feminist looking on. But it was Sartre who gave it wide currency. Well, bully for him, for nothing explains the human condition, and the Hell Human, better.)

But neither Hell can claim the level of torment, of sheer pointless torture, of that greatest of hells, the Hell in limbo.

Just imagine: a cavernous hall of endless dimensions; masses of unwashed aimless wanderers; waiting, waiting, waiting forever for nothing at all to happen; going round in circles; being treated like cattle; being pushed and prodded and searched and stripped and tagged and examined and zapped and rayed; eyes glazed; sweat dripping from every pore; feet and ankles inflamed; interminable, endless (the redundancy is for effect), waiting, waiting, waiting; the stale air; the overpowering, dizzying odour of fried and burnt flesh and of vats of boiling oil … Welcome to the Modern Airport.

Every time I think I have hit rock bottom in my airport experience, the Gods intervene to teach me humility. And we are talking about someone who has assiduously, almost religiously, stuck to travelling only in “developed” countries. Next time I cross the pond, I'll try an oceanliner.

I don't want to end on such a negative note, so a word or two on work. I'm learning a whole new discipline and new procedures, and of course trying to familiarise myself with the lingo/jargon as I go along. I cannot claim a great sense of joy and excitement each time I utter the words “I don't know what I am talking about” – fifty times a day, by the way – after fourteen years of practice. At the same time, it is certainly good to be back on a learning curve, sometimes struggling to keep my head above water, often simply listening and absorbing.

A student of mine at Science-Po wrote in his class evaluation that “the Professor is too full of himself.” (In a subsequent email to me he suggested that he might have been too full of himself to have made such a comment in the first place, but that is a separate point.) No danger of that now. It is an eminently humbling experience, throwing myself into a new field and a new role. Where it goes in the end, I do not know; for now, it's both challenging and interesting.

Next Episode: “The Highlander” , a journal of my travels in and about Scotland

Dr. Borna Meisami Fard

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Ah, love! Could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?

Father, husband, son, brother, and a true Friend, Dr. Borna Meisami–Fard joined Eternity in our hearts on 1 July 2007. Born forty years ago on 28 May 1967 in Tehran, Iran, Borna and his family came to Canada in 1984. He studied at the University of Toronto and graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1992. He then pursued his dream of specializing in orthopedic surgery and established what was to become a thriving practice in Toronto.

In an age of Identities, he eschewed labels and wove his own cultural tapestry out of a deep love for his land of birth and an equally deep commitment to his adopted home; never losing touch with the one, never losing sight of other, he made both Iran and Canada his home and native land. But there was more, much more, to him than all that.
 
Despite the impositions of a demanding profession, Borna's guiding axiom was that “life demands to be lived”. An avid traveler, a passionate humanitarian, a connoisseur of fine food, a sailor and skier and all around sports fan, a keen observer of national and international issues, a voracious reader of history; but above all, a friend, a companion of stormy nights and of sun-drenched moments, an endlessly patient support, a pillar of the community: Borna was a compleat human.
 

And over the past three years, he became complete. He married out of love a woman out of legend; the arrival of their daughter rounded their happiness eighteen months ago.

Shattered and disconsolate by his loss are Dr. Marjan Tabatabai, his wife; Ava, his daughter; Dr. Tina Meisami–Fard, his sister; Dr. Iraj and Mrs. Badri Meisami–Fard, his parents; his family and relatives spread across this Mortal Orb; and the many friends gathered and nurtured with unfailing attention and support over the years. Not one soul touched even briefly by his kindness shall ever forget that Moment; thus he lives on as he leaves us.
I have lived and have not lived in vain …
But there is that within me which shall tire
Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire …


Roma Eterna

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It is said that when John Glenn, the first American in space, flew past Italy, he checked his wallet to make sure it was still there. (Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, would probably have done the same, had he been sober; Valentina Treshkova, the first woman in space, might well have done so in between her bouts of hysterics and throwing up.) It is a cheap joke, of course – John Glenn would not have been carrying a wallet – for, after all, I have been to Italy eight times (including three times to Rome and once to Sicily) and have never had a wallet, or anything else, stolen.
 
Still.  Like most cheap jokes, there is an element of truth in it – I mean, in addition to Gagarin being drunk and Treshkova in tears.  We found that out the hard way, when I was in Rome with my parents, sister and brother-in-law.
 
On the morning of our third day in Rome, my mom put quite a lot of cash in the purse to go shopping.  Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for some Roman purse-snatcher,* my mom did not find anything to her liking.  We went for a walk, and something not so funny happened on the way to the Forum: in the literally two minutes that my Mom was looking at the inside of the Curia in the Foro Romano, someone helped him or herself to my mother's purse and glasses.  Back to the apartment; cancelled the credit cards; filed a police report … and, to my parents' enormous credit, we were back in the city being tourists within a couple of hours.  Naturally they were both very upset, but they put their happy faces on and enjoyed the rest of the trip. 
 

* “Roman” in the sense of someone in Rome.  Roman friends of ours insisted that it was not the Italians but some undefined foreigners who are responsible for the crime.  But then they would, wouldn't they.

 

What is there left to say about Rome that has not been said a million times over the past two millennia? 
 
And can one improve on Byron or Fellini?  
 
Elsewhere I have lamented the “anecdotisation” of experience, and pointedly refused to describe those moments in my life that had to be lived through to be really understood.  There have not been many, to be sure, but each time I sit down to write something about a place or an emotion or a person, I have to wonder if I am turning a moment of personal experience into an amusing anecdote for its own sake, and whether in doing so, I am somehow losing the spirit of the moment.  But then, if one starts with the premise that pretty much all that needed to be said about Rome has already been said, and better, by others, what is left but the personal and the anecdote?
 
What is worse, I don't have any amusing anecdotes to impart.  Aside from the stolen purse, the rest of the trip was fairly calm and uneventful.  We managed to hit some of the major sites without too many problems; we avoided the highway banditry of Italian touristaurants by carefully following tourist guidebooks (there's irony for you), and thus ate well and relatively cheaply; and though I had excellent tiramisú, I still have not found what I could describe definitively as the best I have had. 
 
I am left with three observations.
 
Galleria dell'Accademia is where, in Florence, the David is kept, as well as several incomplete works by Michelangelo.  I had seen the replica of David in the main Piazza of Florence before; even so, I was unprepared for the real thing.  Vasari, the great art critic, has said that to see David is to face perfection; one might as well give up on all the rest.  I should not go that far, for Michelangelo's other works, Pieta and Moses, are nothing to shake a stick at.  And yet, there is something haunting, deeply striking, about David.  As to its technical perfection there can be no doubt – but there have been many technically proficient artists whose work have not lasted even past their own lifetimes; indeed, as Clive James has observed, technical proficiency is probably the one thing that genius and mediocrity have in common.  
 
Michelangelo once said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  There are four unfinished examples of his work in the Accademia and, looking at those and David at the same time, you suddenly realise what he meant.
 
Much has been written about the sense of proportion in David's construction.  Indeed, right beside David, there is a version of Pieta that, in its absence of proportion, immediately underlines the magnificence of David … and also that this other Pieta could not possibly have been the work of Michelangelo.  What is striking about the proportionality of David is not so much that the hands and the feet and so on are proportionate to one another – that would be easy to get – but that, knowing that his 5 meter statue would be put on a pedestal, Michelangelo structured his David to seem proportionate from below: If looked at straight ahead, the head is disproportionately large; from below, it all looks harmonious.  
 
And the head … we have all seen pictures of the furrowed brows, the intense look, the turned head … the sling slung over his shoulder and the rocks in his languid hands … now, this is the essence of genius.  He captures a moment; a moment in movement; a moment of emotion.  Standing in front of the statue, walking around it, your eyes are transfixed by  that look in the eyes of the marble statue.  My mom asked a question that, at the time, seemed strange to me, but upon reflection, hits the bull's eye in respect of Michelangelo's strength and artistry.  She asked, “so who was he?”  I asked her, “you mean, David?”  She replied, “No, I mean him.”  The determined youth with the furrowed brows; him.  That five meter block of carved and chiseled marble was almost real, almost alive; it holds within it, and on its skin, the expression of a real young man who modelled for Michelangelo.  Who was he?  Who knows?  And yet, like Mona Lisa's smile, those brows and those eyes convey across the centuries an emotion as raw and as immediate as if the young man were right in front of you, glaring, determined, impetuous.
 
The Vatican houses two of Michelangelo's other masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta.  The Sistine experience is one of those moments that defy description; in fact, I think all art commentary and all movies about the famous ceiling should be banned. (There is, in the awful movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, a particularly odious scene where Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston – the marbles in the quarry he was working in had more character than he did – sees the “creation” scene in the moveme nt of the clouds.  I choked and had to stop the movie for a few minutes to regain my breath.  Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II was excellent, though.  I mean, a pope in full military armour – how could you go wrong?) 
 
The Pieta sits behind bullet-proof glass in St. Peter's Basilica.  I am not a big fan of St. Peter's.  I find the “mine is bigger than yours” lines in the middle aisle (“Notre Dame of Paris comes to here, while St. John's of New York only manages to be half as long as St. Peter's”) unseemly and faintly grotesque.  The fine bronze Baldacchino might well have impressed me if I did not know that the bronze to make it was stripped off the roof of the Pantheon, in my view the finest building in Rome and among the finest I have ever see.  And then there is marble to the right of us, marble to the left of us, marble in front of us; into that valley of death rode – ahem, sorry, got carried away.  That's the problem: the architect got carried away.  Almost everything in St. Peter's is too much; not as much of a too much as the Gésu or the St. Ignatius Loyola churches – that would be even too much of a too much – but still, too much.  Almost, for there is the  Pieta, which is just perfect. 
 
And I mean perfect not just in a technical or an artistic sense.  Here is where I am not certain Vasari had it right.  Because while David packs a big wallop of artistic and emotional impact, the Pieta has all of that, and more.  For one thing, it is on a human scale; for another, both in composition and in construction, the Pieta is far more fluid than the David.  If one observes a moment – strong, though it may be, but still a moment – in David, in the Pieta there is a whole drama that is unfolding in the folds of Mary's robes and the falling arms and legs of the dead Jesus.  The Pieta is behind bullet-proof glass because it has been attacked several times.  Attacked.  A statue.  Unthinkable, in the abstract.  But then, stand before it for any length of time, and the thing overwhelms you.  More than all of the blood and torture in Mel Gibson's Passion; more than all twisted crucifixes; more than all the Sunday morning sermons of the agonies of Christ: this piece of inert marble moves you; makes you tremble with pity, and then with rage; and across four hundred years, shakes you to your foundations.  Even for a rationalist like me, the Pieta is powerful propaganda; good then, that it is hidden away, behind bullet-proof glass, in a corner of a an all-too phallocentric church in Rome.
 
The Moses is not, at least in my view, one of Michaelangelo's best works.  It is impressive, to be sure.  But, I confess, seeing it left me unmoved.  Certainly my lack of reaction was not because of its history.  The Moses was meant to be part of a far larger group of statues made for the tomb of Julius II, the warrior pope (who had also commissioned the Sistine Chapel).  But when Michelangelo and Julius were not fighting over money, they had artistic difficulties, and this battle between the stubborn artist and the pope-in-armor went on for a decade – until the good pope died.  And then there was no money; and Michelangelo was in one of his funks; and there were other priorities … well, in the end, even though Michelangelo lived on to be 80, he did not finish a lot of the statues in the group (and three of these ended up in the Accademia, one in the Louvre).  The only one that was finished was the  Moses, which ended up adorning the tomb of Julius, now dead for thirty years. (The smell must have awful ….)
 
The interesting thing about the statue is that Moses appears to have two horns.  I actually do not know Michelangelo's reasons for the horns, but there are two intriguing precedents, neither of which, I am certain, Michelangelo knew of, which makes the whole thing even more interesting.  The first is this: coins struck under the rule of Alexander also show him with horns – in one set they are highly stylised, but in another, they are clearly ram's horns.  What does this mean?  Not clear.  Even more fascinating is the only extant image of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire.  It is indistinct, battered by sandstorms and rain and wind and the hammer of the invader over 2,500 years.  And yet, unmistakable: his crown is resting on two horns on his head.  What could this possibly mean?
 
And the most spooky thing of all: Machiavelli, whose tomb is practically next to that of Michelangelo's in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, noted that the two greatest law givers in human history were Moses and … Cyrus of Persia.  Did the horns symbolise anything?  How could Michelangelo have known of Cyrus's horns?  Did he know of Alexander's?  Are we in Dan Brown territory?
 
Or is there some other, totally benign, explanation?
 
After Rome, I went back to the English castle at which I taught international trade law last year.  The programme was slightly different this year; but the students, much like last year, were bright, articulate, curious and motivated.  It is a strange thing, to be teaching first-year law students nearly twenty years after I myself first went to law school.  It is a humbling experience to come across students already so accomplished; it is exhilarating to be challenged by their idealism; and their optimism is not only refreshing but positively infectious.  It is a hokey thing to say, perhaps, but at the end of every class and every course, I become slightly more optimistic about the future of my profession, but also of the world we live in.  If a refurbished Tudor Castle in the bucolic East Sussex country were a microcosm of our troubled world, we should have nothing to worry about.  I will banish any contrary thoughts from my mind, at least for the next few months.

How Green Was My Valley

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This post started as a commentary on my last major travel, in January, to Dubai to visit my relatives.  The composition of that post was delayed by a combination of laziness, lack of inspiration, and a number of minor excursions here and there (Paris to teach, Verbier and Les Contamines to ski).  Nearly three months later, a New Day is upon us – Spring arrives in a few hours – when a young man’s fancy turns to love, and that of a newly minted 40-year old to finishing long-begun blogs.

‘Tis true.

This past January I turned 40.  Hard to believe – especially as I do not feel a day over 39 – but there you have it.  I could go on either lamenting the onset of middle-age (assuming I last to my eightieth), or celebrating it (40 is the new 25, I am told, with more money and fewer pimples); I could, like so many prophets before me at this same age, wander off into the desert, or climb a mountain, or be lost in a thick forest, in the hopes of seeing a burning Bush or a shimmering Gabriel, or gaining 400 pounds and being deified; I could wax philosophical about the Meaning of Life, or lose myself in a haze of hedonistic romps … I’ll spare you all of that and simply note the occasion.  And, also, note that I spent this milestone with a dear aunt whom I had not seen for over twenty years, and cousins who, last time we spent time together, were six year-olds climbing all over me at my grandmother’s place in an old quarter in Tehran.

Just seeing them again after such a long time was probably the best gift Providence (and Visa and Aeroplan) could have given me.  My youngest aunt was, and remains, the very personification of kindness, warmth, and generosity.  The older of my two cousins still had the same infectious laughter that I adored; the younger one and I talked and bonded as if there had not been a gulf of twenty-four years between our last two visits.  My uncle was sensible and calm as I remembered him; and I met my cousin’s husband and, I hope, made a new friend in him – a kindred spirit despite our vastly different backgrounds.

As for Dubai – well, I had to eventually see what all the fuss was about.  The only thing I could say is that one marvels how the Bedouins of this otherwise desolate land have managed to persuade the world over to come and invest in their corner of the Arabian desert.  One wonders about countries with so much more natural wealth (one across the Persian Gulf comes to mind) that … ah, but the thing is so obvious as not to bear further observation.  Dubai: not my cup of tea, but impressive nevertheless.

Upon my return from Dubai I had to get ready for a series of lectures at the Science-Po in Paris; I also spent some time in Verbier, one of Europe’s most well-known ski resorts.  Unfortunately, snow conditions were, and remain, less than ideal; at the same time, it was good to have a place to go to weekends.  And walking up and down the mountain to get to the apartment certainly was helpful in bringing the 40 year-old waist-line under control.  Along with my season’s pass at Verbier, I also got passes for some of the other ski resorts in the region.  This is why last weekend I went to Les Contamines, one of the most beautiful ski resorts in the Alps.  And it was my drive to Les Contamines that inspired me for the title of this email.

“How Green Was My Valley” was the title of a wonderful, and wonderfully sad, 1941 movie starring a young Roddy McDowell.  The title was a lamentation, somewhat ironic, about the passing of a way of life in a coal-mining town in Wales.  The title, and the movie, came to me as I was driving down the Arve Valley, oddly green up to 1800 meters, listening to a Donna Summer song from the 70s on Nostalgia radio.  The song reminded me of the first time I had heard it; how utterly carefree I had been, in that summer of 1976, newly returned from the US.  It was a time, at least for me, when hope had dominion; the world was a kinder place, or at least it so seems at such a distance.  I was smiling nostalgically in the car, remembering the passing of a way of life; recalling, not without a measure of irony (for all was not well in my idyllic world, as we were soon to discover), how green had been my valley.  Here I was, thirty years later, driving through an unusually (for this time of year) green valley that, oddly, sadly, I knew better now than the valleys and the mountains and the streets and the streams whence I had sprung.

I wonder how much longer the Alps will retain their winter luster; whether the Mont Blanc will remain blanc for much longer.  It has begun to snow again in the region – now I have to worry about my cherry blossoms – but the glaciers have already receded dangerously; “how green was my valley” would be the lamentation of a new generation used to whiter mountains and gorges, who would perhaps mourn the passing of their own way of winter life in due course.  Be that as it may, they, like me, will no doubt find new valleys and new vistas to explore, new worlds in which to prosper.

It is in that somewhat bittersweet mood that I welcome the arrival of a new day, and a new Persian year; it is, however, with considerable hope and optimism that I wish all of you the best for the coming year.