Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

At first we see nothing but a frosted glass wall. Soon it recedes, to reveal three men sitting around a table small enough to force them to eat off the same plates and pay some attention to where they replace their drinks. We would do well to remember their faces: one face we will see twice more; a second a few more times; and the last will stare back at us in disbelief for the rest of its existence. Two of the men are very intently conversing: one is talking and the other digesting every syllable as if it were an epiphany or a threat. The eyes of the third careen between the two in that way that non-participants have of insinuating themselves into the conversations and lives of others. When they toast and laugh at some hilarity, the interlocutors will slam their absinthes, and then tap the third’s soda can gently, because it is clear that gently is the only way this fellow must be handled. The talker will leave his garage and, ever weary of the coming storm, throw some scraps lovingly to his dog. But it is only when we espy comets hurtling down a midnight path that we truly find ourselves within this film.

The plot, we are assured, is a simple one: a face from our first scene, Kenan (Fırat Tanış), steps out of those comets, which happen to be police cars, the long palm of the law shoving him towards the darkness. He is asked questions (“Was it here?” “Are you telling me the truth?”) posed in like measure to the schoolchild and the criminal, with both terms readily applicable.  No, there was a fountain, says Kenan, perhaps to wash away sins, years, tears – we have our surmises.  He will continue to ogle in perplexity life and its inhabitants as if he cannot believe what has happened to him, which may be the very definition of hell. At the second, equally unsuccessful stop that long palm, which belongs to police sergeant Naci (Yılmaz Erdoğan), quivers in amazement as to why this search party of fourteen, including a doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) and a prosecutor (Taner Birsel), cannot seem to find their object of desire. Kenan is not sure of the place because, to no one's surprise, he was inebriated at the time (Naci makes him confess in triplicate), and we recall his lustful chugs of his full and misty glass. From another comet emerges Kenan's brother Ramazan, the coke-swilling non-participant from our first scene, but he too doesn't know ("You don't know or don't remember?" Naci wonders aloud, the very conundrum of history).  When he finally admits that he was asleep, his brother swerves his gaze of horror upon him, which means Ramazan at the scene of the crime may have been any number of things, but he was surely wide awake for its atrocity.

We learn something more about Naci and his intelligent but physically unwell son; we also learn that Arap (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), his driver and sidekick, has no small resentment about this life and its injustices. Yet in short order all other characters yield to the thoughts and actions of two men, Dr. Cemal and Prosecutor Nusret. The similarities between the two men begin in very male matters: the prosecutor stops frequently to urinate and is accused of having prostate issues; the doctor heeds the call of nature discreetly in a quiet corner far from the band of corpse-hunters and is confronted by an ancient stone scarecrow. The doctor is divorced with no kids; the prosecutor blesses a childless divorce, then relates the tale of "the wife of a friend," a "smart, educated woman, not the least bit superstitious," who predicted her death to the very day. That gloomy day was less than a week after she had given birth to a healthy daughter. The film will furnish two explanations for this story and support both until its final minutes, during which a slip of the tongue implies only one possible reason the prosecutor could have sought the doctor's counsel. A third attempt by the searchers produces nothing more than anger and frustration and the group of men – except for one miserable scene in which the wife of one of the characters is forced to say "yes," women and children will be silent for the film's entirety – will proceed to a nearby village for some food and rest.  It is here that manmade lights will go out, and the bringer of natural illumination will appear like some fallen angel – and we should say no more than that.

Ceylan's obvious precursor is this Russian director of genius: in Tarkovsky's masterpieces winds also caress lonely fields and trigger unforeseeable chains of memories; characters engage in long, impassioned dialogues until we notice that their lips have not been moving; and an undercurrent of fatidic patterning whispers that the symbols of our existence crouch in unplain sight. There are many such moments in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which seems much more concerned with its dead than its living (two unrelated requests for morgues surface), and none more beautiful than the way in which the doctor makes his final decision, the prosecutor reenters a room very unexpectedly, and Naci informs his captive that the rules have changed. In lesser films, all these scenes would have been imbued with histrionics, foul language, or, worst of all, non-diegetic music instructing the idiot viewer as to what he should be feeling at that moment. And why should it concern itself so much with its dead? Consider how long it actually takes the men to find the cadaver in question, and then how unceremoniously they handle their business; how the doctor sifts through old pictures, mostly of himself; how Arap explains what he does in free time; how the mayor describes his village's demographics; what happens immediately following one character's recitation of the film's title and reference to a fairy tale; and how the band of brothers and brothers' keepers always manage to remain one step ahead of the unrelenting rain. Because the rain will always overtake earthbound fugitives, be they above or below those plowed fields. Just like the apples a hungry and bored Arap loosens from a tree, shiny red apples with a crescent on its cheek. And we know what fairy tales tend to do with shiny red apples.

sYıldız

Short Speech of a Landless Journeyman

The following speech against German reunification was given by this late author on February 2, 1990. “Landless journeymen” (Vaterlandslose Gesellen, usually as a plural) was one of the ways in which the last Kaiser would refer to anyone of the political left, as well as a general term for cosmopolitan businessmen who fancy personal profit over their country’s needs.  The speech is included in this book.

As I was coming from Göttingen shortly before Christmas, and just as I had wanted to change trains to Lübeck at Hamburg’s central train station, a young man came up to me. He stopped me dead in my tracks, called me a traitor, and left me with this word echoing. Then, after I had casually purchased a newspaper, he came up to me again, now not with mild threats but openly proclaiming that the time had come to get rid of people like me. I shook off this annoyance while still on the platform and proceeded to Lübeck wrapped in my thoughts. “Traitor!” A word that, coupled with “landless journeyman,” was truly part of German history. Was the truculent young man not right after all? Can a fatherland for whose benefit one is to get rid of people like myself not remain something stolen from me? This is indeed the case. Not only do I fear a simplified Germany as the composite of two Germanys, I also reject a unified state and would be relieved – be it owing to German prudence or to the objection of our neighbors – if it never came to pass.

Of course, I am well aware that my stance currently unleashes debate if not aggression, which doesn’t only make me think of the young man at Hamburg’s central train station. Much subtler and tidier work is being done by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with those people who categorically refer to themselves as left-wing intellectuals. It is not enough for their editors that communism is bankrupt; democratic socialism, including Dubček’s dream of socialism with a human face, is also finished. One thing that capitalists and communists have always had in common is the preventive condemnation of a Third Way. That’s why any reference to the now-contested autonomy of the GDR and its citizens is immediately greeted with emigration and resettlement figures. The self-confidence that they developed despite suffering under oppression for forty years, and which ultimately became revolutionary, is now written in fine print. So we are supposed to get the impression that in Leipzig and Dresden, in Rostock and East Berlin, it is not the people of the GDR who have triumphed but the whole gamut of Western capitalism. And the pillaging has already begun. Hardly had one ideology lost its hold before another ideology stepped in as if it had always been there. If necessary, market economy instruments of torture are flashed. Who doesn’t feel it gets nothing. Not even bananas.

No, I do not want an improper, crowing, attack-battened fatherland like that, even if nothing is at my disposal to ward off mockery apart from my own thoughts. I already fear that reunification, regardless of what name it chooses to camouflage itself, is inevitable. The strong Deutschmark will see to that; the mountainous printed editions of Springer’s media empire, now in collaboration with Rudolf Augstein’s Monday morning meanderings, will see to that; and German forgetfulness will see to that. In the end, we’ll number about eighty million. Once again we will be one, we will be strong. And even when we try to speak softly, we will be heard in the loudest tones. Finally, because enough is never enough, we will manage with our tough Deutschmark and recognition of Poland’s western border to subjugate economically a good chunk of Silesia, a good chunk of Pomerania, and, in textbook German fashion, once again isolate ourselves and strike fear in the hearts of others. I am already betraying this fatherland. My fatherland would have to be more varied, brighter, more neighborly, wiser from the damage done, and much more palatable to Europe.

Nightmare versus dream. What is preventing us from helping the German Democratic Republic and its citizens by means of just and long overdue burden sharing, so that the GDR might strengthen itself economically and democratically and its citizens might make less of an effort to remain at home? Why must the German Federation, whose neighbors could come to accept us, always keep adding titles to its name, from espousing a vague Paulskirche concept as a federal state to assuming the form of a large federal republic? Are comprehensive unity, greater land area, conglomerated economic power then all desired components of growth? Isn’t all this once again too much? Since the mid-1960s, I have given speeches and written essays against reunification and spoken out in favor of a confederation. Here again I will answer the German question. I’ll sum it up in not ten, but five points:

First: A German confederation abolishes the postwar relationship of the two German states as foreign countries. It also removes a worthless border separating Europe while still taking into consideration the concerns and fears of its neighbors by constitutionally doing without the need to reunify the two states.

Second: A confederation of both German states would not do any harm to either postwar German history or the history of either of the two states. In fact, it would enable something new: independent commonality. And a confederation is sufficiently sovereign to meet all federal obligations as well as those of mutual European security.

Third: A confederation of both German states is more suited to the process of European unification than an overweight unified state, all the more since a unified Europe will be a confederation and will have to overcome traditional national statehood.

Fourth: A confederation of both German states starts us on the path to a different and desirably new understanding of ourselves. It bears a collective responsibility to German history as a nation of culture. This understanding of nation was taken up by the failed Paulskirche convention, and is to be seen as an expanded concept of culture joining the variety of German culture without a need to declare German national unity.

And Fifth: A confederation of both German states, as a resolution to a conflict between states of a nation of culture, would give impetus to the worldwide resolution of different yet comparable conflicts, be it in Korea, Ireland, Cyprus, or the Near East, anywhere, in fact, where national state action has set aggressive borders or where it seeks to widen them. Resolution of the German question through confederation could serve as an example.

A few additional comments: the German unified state only existed in its enlarged size for seventy-five years: as a German Reich under Prussian dominion; as the doomed Weimar Republic; and, up until its unconditional surrender, as the Greater German Reich. We should be conscious – our neighbors are quite conscious – of how much suffering this unified state has caused and the level of misfortune it has brought upon itself and others. The genocide that can be made relative in no way and is summarized in the word Auschwitz remains on the conscience of this unified state. Never had Germans, in all their history until that point, fallen into such ill repute. They were neither better nor worse than other peoples. Complex-saturated megalomania did not lead Germans to make use of this opportunity as a nation of culture within a federal state, but to thrust upon themselves with all force the title of unified Reich. This was the early prerequisite for Auschwitz. Latent, as well as common anti-Semitism then became the basis of its power. The German unified state abetted the National Socialist racist ideology by providing a repulsively suitable foundation. Nothing will get past this acknowledgement. Whoever thinks of Germany now and looks for answers to the German question must think of Auschwitz as well. The site of horror as an example for the lingering trauma excludes the possibility of a future unified German state. Should it, as I fear, nevertheless be attempted, it will be doomed to failure from the onset.

More than twenty years ago here in Tutzing the phrase “transformation through rapprochement” was coined; a long since controversial but ultimately verified formula. Rapprochement is now part of everyday politics. The German Democratic Republic was transformed thanks to the revolutionary will of its people; but as its citizens look on – half in admiration, half in condescension – the Federal Republic of Germany has yet to be transformed. “We don’t want,” they say to their Eastern counterparts, “to tell you what to do, but…” And interference is now common. Help, real help will only come under West German conditions. Property sure enough, but please no property of the people. The western ideology of capitalism which seeks to obliterate every other ideological ismus speaks up like a pistol held to the head: either a market economy or…

And who wouldn’t raise his hand here and give in to the blessings of the strong, whose impropriety is so clearly made relative by its success? I fear that we Germans will also turn down a second chance at self-determination. Being a nation of culture with confederated variety is obviously too little for us. And “rapprochement through transformation” is, if only because of its exorbitance, simply asking too much. But the German question cannot be answered in Marks and Pfennigs.

What did the young man at Hamburg’s central train station say? Right he was. As the case may be, I am counted among the landless journeymen.

Shroud

He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a frenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner.

Our beliefs assume curious shapes as dusk descends; what we have loved becomes either more enchanting or more alien; what we have feared glows with illuminant strength; and what we have known sinks into a morass of ruinous doubt. It is not our faith weakening as the light, but our gradual glimpse of the obverse of that old coin we had been carrying so confidently in our pockets. And even if the two-headed coin of conjurors and charlatans, one face will necessarily be darker, the duplicate or understudy. A small hint at the structure of this novel.

Our novel is cloven into three, perhaps because only three characters have any bearing on its outcome. The first and most rotund is a tall, lecherous, one-eyed beast of an academic with the unripe name of Axel Vander. The name, as any speaker of Dutch will tell you, seems to indicate a nobiliary particle with a syncopation of its final and most important component – a fact that Vander duly notes, then, like most everything else, brushes to the side to deal with more pressing problems. The most pressing at hand may come in the form of Catherine Cleave, dite Cass, our second character, apparently Irish, and as young, feminine, and thin as the aging Vander is bulgingly male. She enters our landscape as the novel opens in his own thoughts; she has discovered his secrets and intends, like any unsteady extortionist, to meet her victim in person. He travels, sweating, cursing, knocking a bad leg to the metronome of his cane, to Italy from California, land of the gold rush, of lawlessness and, towards the end of the twentieth century – a century that he knows almost in its entirety – a cultural vacuum where a learned man can hide in peace. More specifically, he will meander to Turin, where he initially plans, like any practiced murderer, to cast Cass Cleave from this famous tower and be done with her.

What our plot entails cannot and should not be elaborated upon in these pages; the pleasure of reading Banville hardly extends into the superficial realm of artifice. His repeated triumphs are the victories of style that frame details so minute as to seem both obvious and radiant. Vander dreams he will rot in a "cavernous hospital in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting"; America to him "seemed like a nonce-word, or an unsolvable anagram, with too many vowels in it"; when asked for a glass of water, a ubiquitous waiter in the Antwerp hotel where Cass and Axel's paths finally cross, "nodded, or perhaps it was a little bow that he made, briefly letting his eyelids fall as he did so, and murmured something, and padded off into the shadows" (I had initially read the passage as "paddled," which would have been even more magnificent). What can be said is that both Axel and Cass – who almost devolve into a rather fitting anagram – are subject to acute hallucinations that could easily be diagnosed by people who enjoy easy diagnoses and easy living. Such an approach will not, however, get us very far. Vander has something wicked on his conscience; it could very well be the fate of his late wife, Magda, appearing most frequently as a stuffed corpse; or a numinous link to Cass's father who revels in the mendacity of the professional actor; or even something increasingly distant for the contemporary reader – the bottomless perdition of the last European War. Contracts were drawn up, mostly with the Devil or his minions, and persons otherwise unconsulted in battle strategies or occupation policies suddenly tended to chirp from the obscurest branches. Vander recalls one of his Belgian compatriots in this vein:

Although at the time I had a foot in the door of a number of papers and periodicals, the Vlaamsche Gazet was unlikely to have been amongst them. The paper's editorial attitude was one of noisy and confident anticipation of what it called the Day of Unity, when all the country's unnamed enemies would finally be dealt with. This Day of Unity was never defined, and a date was never put on it, but everyone knew what it would be when it came, and knew who those enemies were, too. The editor, Hendriks – I have forgotten his first name – large, overweight, glistening, with a wheezing laugh and furtive eyes, had, in the early years of that dirty decade that was now coming to a calamitous end, decided in which direction the future was headed, despite the fact that, in private, he expressed nothing but contempt for our immediate and increasingly menacing neighbor to the east.

Vander will gain the by-lines he so craves, and only at the cost of a few scruples; Hendriks gets his comeuppance a few years after the war as one of the swinging sacks of Jack Ketch. Whether Vander sees this fate as justice depends in no small part to what he thinks of destiny, whether what we do and those who fall as our victims could play any role in our own condemnation – and perhaps enough has been said on the matter.

There is a topical undercurrent to Shroud that may rile those who believe in art as an island replete with apolitical fauna and flora. At worst, the implications come off as a thin crutch, no more supportive than Vander's own Faustian staff; at best, the historical context infuses the tale with much-needed logic and causality. And yet, there are many unlikelihoods. That long and horrific night when an anonymous letter, in a Satanic reversal of a Biblical passage, saves Vander from certain destruction; the random appearances of a secondary character of impossible age best accounted for as "an off-duty clown"; the syndrome (perhaps lifted from this novel) that causes Cass to smell almonds and then slowly unfurl the foolscap of her very troubled mind; the whole conceit of Lady Laura, whose life is an amalgamation of so many woeful habits that it would seem well-nigh impossible for her to exist for the years and the circumstances provided (although her nasty form of retribution is spot-on); yet the most unlikely of all the scenarios involves Cass herself. That Kristina Kovacs, a former flame now dying as slowly as Vander's memories, would be interested in one last carnal exploration in which she might recall the Sapphic nights of her enlightened youth is perfectly plausible; that Vander himself could see anything in his blackmailer except insanity may suggest what state his mind and soul currently inhabit. Yet through this long and lusty poem, one face stands out as true and enduring, the "raptor's profile of a desert monarch," a thin and eternally pensive physician who comes to Vander's aid then hovers in his vicinity. Perhaps he is convincing because his secret is unambiguously clear; perhaps his utter indifference and opposition to Vander can be taken as a symbol of what Vander has long since avoided. And we haven't even mentioned who gets to play the Harlequin.

Baudelaire, "Semper eadem"

A work ("Ever the same") by this French poet.  You can read the original here. 

"Whence," did you ask, "derives this sadness strange,
In tides sea-like upon the bare black rock?"
Yet once our heart has reaped its harvest plain,
To live is woe. All guard this secret's lock:

A simple, not mysterious pain has come,
And, like your joy, all dazzles in release.
So quit your search, O comely, curious one!
And though of softest voice, so hold your peace!

O foolish one! O ever-happy soul!
Your mouth of childish laughs!  Than Life even more,
'Tis Death which binds us by the subtlest beams.

Leave my heart drunk upon a masquerade,
In your eyes plung'd, as in the finest dream,
Adoze for long beneath your brows' dim shade!

On Perspective

One is scarcely encouraged, at least in certain very privileged parts of the world, to voice cacophonous opinions regarding the preeminence of culture. What we do within our country, say that country's pundits, must be given the full respect of those without, especially if the outsiders are obliged to evaluate these details with fractured lenses. And what entails fractured lenses? Consider a country that you have not visited and whose language you know nothing of; consider again what surfaces when you are asked to picture life in that country; consider finally from where these images, words, and nexuses derive. If you were to commit your unabetted reflections to paper and ask coevals whose experiences are similar to do the same, you may be surprised at the uniformity of your answers. You may learn that the Greeks, for example, are thought of as complicating and proud, nostalgic for a past that is so glorious that the centuries of all the countries in Europe combined could not compare, bitter in a way that their recognition as such has been mostly forgotten by ignorance and political convenience. You may learn that Athens will inevitably be described as crowded, hot under skies as blue as the Greek flag, and in ruins like some city-sized outdoor museum replete with the usual slew of street vendors and charlatans. At length you may learn that Greeks tend to speak good English, have a high opinion of themselves that is foolishly interpreted as arrogance, and may not be the most engaging and obsequious when it comes to making your stay comfortable. Since a great deal of Greek blood courses through my veins I can say without fear of perjury that this synopsis, which any Anglophone knowing nothing more about Greece than the names of a few famous writers will unerringly pronounce, is completely true. Why it is completely true and what we should make of such of constellation of detail is what we may loosely term perspective.

Perspective is almost always right because the masses can look upon their fellow man and sense things that escape the most specialized of laboratorians. When there is a tendency to be shallow, vain, or harmlessly overweening, such a tendency does not elude the watchful eyes of the rabble. It is this same rabble, in fact, who diagnose a situation most accurately because they look to the core of the matter and espy what they have always been told exists, and the kernel of truth in such platitudes is the kernel that pops when we agitate the bag. Take a band of Anglophones in Greece accumulating the impressions mentioned above: a Greek nationalist or an immigrant who typically overidentifies with his forefathers and fights battles that neither they nor he could ever win might be quick to denounce these remarks. How could anyone say anything negative about the society that bestowed upon us democracy, classical art, and philosophy? Do we not owe Greeks the entirety of our civilization? We do very much so, and it is regrettable how insouciantly their legacy is treated by the modern mind, entranced as it is by its own age and accomplishments. Yet what Greece holds (and does not hold) for the modern mind does not surprise me, because what is missing between Greece, its riches, lore, and ingenuity, is approximately two thousand years of equalization. In a curious way Greece remains our illustrious ancestor whose achievements will always surpass our own. And as is habitual among heirs, some will look upon this fact with unending awe, while others will only resent that they did not come first.

This is why those of us who believe in the moral goodness of our world, in its inherent virtue, in man's innate desire to love, be loved, and help the weak and poor, will be able to discern the truth about many places and times, including Greece. Ask an antiquarian about Hellenic civilization and he might show you some fine pottery; ask a classicist and he might recite a poem by this poet; ask a Russian or a Serb and you might be surprised at the chauvinism in favor of their Orthodox brethren. As it were, the truth about Greece lies not the uniformity of superficial observations but in their interlinkage. I may tend to look back upon what occurred two thousand years ago (and well before) with a sentimentally teary eye because my heritage has raised me to understand what the Greeks did as not only significant, but also eternal. I may sneer at people who think that civilizations whose apogees lie in the distant past do not deserve much consideration since we all must confront the here and now. And I may be particularly hasty to justify and defend any odd practices – there were quite a few – of these same Hellenes because their means led to distinctly remarkable ends. I am right and wrong about all these points; where I am right is obvious; where I am wrong will also depend on perspective.

Despite recent claims by science and its peremptory minions, perspective on the sun and moon is relative only insofar as we understand ourselves to be glued to a planet that tilts in an endless universe, rendering our small sphere nothing more than a period in a thousand-page novel. We are moving, sure enough, but is your sun or your moon really relative? What to the untrained eye, or better phrased, to the naked eye, really seems to be relative? You may listen to scientists all you want (they certainly like to hear themselves talk), but what does your soul and mind or their collaboration tell you about the stars and sky? Do you ever stop to think whether someone is seeing things the exact way that you see them, an old Romantic convention, or do you really believe that we all see them differently? Are we hoodwinked by our dullness into believing that every moment of every day things are just a bit different to every single person at every single place on earth and that, therefore, there can be no true coincidence of visions? Perhaps a militant astronomer will argue this point and he will end up sitting alone at the end of a long banquet table. But what holds this planet together is something very different, which we may, for lack of a better word, also call perspective.

It has been said that literature, to avoid becoming an arcane cult of a mandarin class, needs to impose its values. And what are its values? Its values may be debated at that same banquet table – but on the other end well out of earshot of the astronomer – yet they involve two persons: the writer of genius and the ideal reader. By definition, one supposes, these cannot be one and the same person. A novelist may compose the perfect story about two lovers, one of whom may be loosely based on himself, the other on the woman whom he will never really forget. He may indicate the details of their palavers, plan their meals and ablutions, temper their attitudes toward the commonality of their relationship, sever bonds with certain salubrious habits to make them more brazen, and grant them a vocabulary that would indicate a higher level of intuition. They will laugh, play, love, sizzle, wince, claw, and break their days into sections that can be analyzed and understood and he will name them as chapters or pages or sentences. They will push their ideas into words and shapes that will dwell within our own words and shapes of our own palavers and meals and ablutions, and we will nod and understand their syntax. And finally – and, some would say, most regrettably – a judgment will have to be pronounced. Is this eternal love or another tale of romance and release? In other words, they will decide either to remain in this connection because fate and desire have willed it thus, or cease to operate in tandem, two branches broken from the same tree or even two flowers who permit intervening weeds to block their closeness. In other words, they will or will not be each other's ideal readers.

That is the choice we face. We may assume the world to be complex and unfathomable in most respects, but we may also choose to understand what part of our world an open mind may perceive as bearing upon his own destiny. The starry sky above us is ours as much as the filth we crush with our jackboots; both of these extremes should frame our reference and our spirit. When you ask me what is a human being, I would respond it is the one living thing on this planet that can relate to both the highest and lowest strata of space and time. Our world in its various and sundry parts is synthesized by one gaze in which we are expected to predict danger, love, fear, ecstasy, and sadness. Classical Greece stretches into Modern Greece as if the Ancients were still speaking through their scions, and yet we perceive the continuum in their profile, their manner, the occasional verb that has been used in the same way for five thousand years. Our perspective is the sum of all mirrors and angles that reflect a unity and solace that cannot be denied, and in its wake we espy, each of us who spends some time to observe rather than project, a clarity that suggests a long tale in a language we might understand at times regarding the matrimony of fate and desire. In fact, we might even go so far as to claim that as life progresses, fate and desire can no longer be distinguished. That last assertion is for the privileged who can choose their fate, their reading, their books, and their perspective. And when they actually look at the world and see only love and hope, then it is we who have become its ideal reader.