George Orwell Warned Us

In most places and most of the time, liberty is not a product of military action. Rather, it is something alive that grows or diminishes every day, in how we think and communicate, how we treat each other in our public discourse, in what we value and reward as a society, and how we do that. 

 - Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Coming to this book on Churchill and Orwell, it didn’t hurt that I had read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia not long ago and still had that story pretty fresh in my mind. Orwell identified as a Leftist all his life, but Catalonia opened his eyes to the true nature of the Communist Party. He quickly realized that the Communists were every bit as totalitarian in their approaches and their aims as were the Fascists and that his real enemy, therefore, wherever it reared its ugly head, was totalitarianism.

He would leave Spain resolved to oppose the abuse of power at both ends of the political spectrum. After Spain, observed the literary critic Hugh Kenner, he would be “a leftist at odds with the official left.” “It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force,” Orwell wrote in 1937.

Churchill, in a strange way, was more a presence in my life as far back as I can remember. “Winston Churchill without the cigar” is how my parents described their first baby (me). But I had never studied his life, so Churchill’s many political setbacks and disappointments (both before and after WWII), as recounted by author Ricks, gave me a new perspective on the British leader’s startling tenacity. Before England’s declaration of war against Germany, Churchill had been unpopular both personally and for his belligerent views.

The leaders of the Tory Party felt [in the 1930s] that as part of keeping Hitler mollified, Churchill must be excluded from a position of leadership.

But in 1940 Hitler began his invasion of Holland and Belgium, bringing Parliament at last to a realization that Chamberlain must go. So Chamberlain would resign, but who would replace him? Lord Halifax, the king’s first choice? Lord Halifax who had requested that the British soccer team give the Nazi salute when playing against the German team in Berlin? No, said Chamberlain, Churchill is the man you want. And so Churchill was appointed rather than elected to serve as Prime Minister.

“I hope that it is not too late. I am very much afraid that it is. We can only do our best.”

Churchill never sugar-coated the truth when he spoke to the English people, and they trusted him for that, almost instinctively it would seem. Neither Churchill nor Orwell was willing to forsake truth for a party line, and both at times suffered for their inflexibility when it came to truth-telling. For instance, largely because the U.S.S.R. had been an important wartime ally of Britain and the United States, Orwell had a hard time finding a publisher for Animal Farm -- surprising difficulty considering publishing track record up to that time.

Both men also had strong opinions and made sure they had facts to back up their viewpoints. Orwell especially proved a ready willingness to change his mind when faced with facts repudiating his earlier position. It must be admitted, however, that either would have been a difficult life companion. 

Churchill was as relentless as a terrier in his pursuit of facts but at dinner parties would launch into monologue, showing so little interest in other people’s lives and stories that he would even recite memorized poems to ensure his ability to hold the floor. He always knew more than anyone else about the topics that interested him, and he had no patience for any other topics. Then there was the drinking. All in all, difficult!

Orwell, unpretentious in dress and manner, comfortable with and sympathetic in general to common people, was overly sensitive to smells, but worse – the real deal-breaker for me – was the lack of self-awareness he showed in what Ricks calls his quick and casual prejudice against the Jews.

The fact of the matter is that Orwell was always tin eared about Jews. During World War II, Orwell would write extensively against anti-Semitism, but in the course of doing so he failed to reexamine his own writings of the previous decade. After the war, he had surprisingly little to say about the Holocaust....”

It is easier to find excuses for his anti-Zionism, since he was suspicious of all nationalisms, but was this particular nationalism more distasteful to him than others? One cannot help but wonder.

Churchill’s genius lay in seeing the Nazi threat for the world danger it was; his virtue was believing in the courage and perseverance of the English people, despite the many strikes against them at the outset of the war. Heaven only knows where Western civilization – and one uses the word with some trepidation in this context – might have gone without Churchill holding out against Hitler and against all the appeasers in the British aristocracy and government.

Orwell’s intellectual gift was his ability to see through party propaganda and cant to the dangers of totalitarianism on both ends of the political spectrum, and his artistic gift, in a spare style very different from Churchill’s oratorical writing, enabled him to bring that clear-sightedness to life in dramatic popular fiction.

What would Orwell make of our world today? Ricks notes that the question is often asked. Notably, individuals living under repressive regimes the world over recognize in 1984 the way their governments twist truth and relentlessly curtail freedom. Also, ironically, apologists from both the right and left eager to claim him as their own.

In 1984, protagonist Winston Smith lives under constant state surveillance. Fear of Big Brother and Communist repression of individuals dominated political discussions in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century, explaining why so many agreed with the slogan, “Better dead than Red.” Big government, regardless of party, was the enemy to be feared. Ricks points out that today’s surveillance in our own country is done more often by business than by government. It is not “the State” but “the Corporation” that follows Americans through every step of their day, noting what products they buy and use, which entertainments they most enjoy, and how they interact with family and friends.

Orwell saw that people might become slaves of the state, but he did not foresee that they might also become something else that would horrify him—products of corporations, data resources to be endlessly mined and peddled elsewhere. He would no doubt have been a powerful critic of such things.

And so, once again, two political extremes face Americans. This time the dilemma popularly posed (i.e., in misleadingly simplistic terms) is not between Fascism and Communism but between unrestrained “predatory capitalism” (the leftist view) and what has been called a “nanny state” (the rightist view). But as was the case with the twentieth-century dilemma posed between Fascism and Communism, I would argue that today’s debate too begins with a false premise. There are avenues and choices beyond simply a “nanny state” and unrestrained “predatory capitalism”), and we should, in the name of freedom, reject both extremes.

Unhappily for the present moment in our country, the State and the Corporation have joined forces, with the State holding onto its authority over citizens at the same time that it grants the Corporation, now legally recognized as a “person,” huge unfair advantage over us. Our own Congress! Over and over, they purport to be “saving” us from a "nanny state" by stripping us of legal, environmental, and other health protections rightly the role and responsibility of government. (We may be moving toward a “police state,” but at the moment we are definitely galloping away from anything that could remotely be called a “nanny state”!) At the federal level (and in many states), executive, legislative, and judicial branches appear to have agreed to sacrifice the interests of American citizen to rich and powerful corporate interests. The latest such legislative move protects financial institutions against citizens’ class-action suits. Anyone who is surprised, however, hasn't been paying attention. Farmers have had to pay attention, because their oxen are being gored, outrageously, on a regular basis. 

This is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into! Where is an Orwell to show clearly of the dangers we face? Where is a Churchill to lead us back toward freedom?

Tolerance and Its Opposite Number

There is often worldwide unease when centuries turn. Certainly such was the case in Europe as the fifteenth century transitioned to the sixteenth. The showdown deciding that era's conflict was dramatized in history in the persons of two very different kinds of Roman Catholic clerics, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Martin Luther. Both men saw abuses in the Church crying out to be corrected, but their personalities and their ways of addressing conflict could not have been more different. 

Erasmus, ever the humanist and conciliator, hoped for reform from within the Church. In truth, he did not interest himself overmuch with theology – certainly not with dogma – and his definition of “Christian” had more to do with a way of life than a set of beliefs. “He alone does honour to the saints who imitates their virtues,” wrote Erasmus. To be Christian, he felt, was to live as Jesus lived. “The quintessence of our religion is peace and unanimity.” Moreover, “Wherever you encounter truth, look upon it as Christianity.”

As someone raised Lutheran, I was shocked to read about the historical founder. I have long disagreed with Luther’s complete dismissal of good works, the dogma of “salvation by grace alone,” but I had no idea – we were never taught in confirmation class – that Luther believed in predestination. No wonder he put no faith (if I may so phrase it) in good works! Theology aside, I was repelled by Luther’s unprincipled pragmatism, as I found it in this book. (I am a pragmatist myself, a romantic pragmatist, but for me pragmatism does not – cannot -- demand the rejection of principles.) Here is Luther, in his own words, telling what we might expect of him in a presidential campaign and what the people of Germany did get from him in his struggle against the Church and against mild-mannered, truth-loving Erasmus: “If you want to better humanity and reform the Church, you cannot afford to fight shy of a good, thumping lie.” Lies in the service of reform. How Socratic!

I have taken these quotes from Erasmus and Luther from Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Stefan Zweig. If you’ve ever wondered how the Enlightenment was pushed offstage by the Reformation, this little book makes a clear case.

Erasmus, the tolerant peacemaker and lover of truth, had no stomach for battle. He wanted only to be left alone with his books. Twice, first at the Diet of Worms, later at the Diet of Augsburg, he stayed away, leaving the field open to Martin Luther and his revolutionary followers. Had Erasmus gone to Augsburg, Zweig believes, reformation might have begun within the Church. There were those on both sides prepared to give ground. But Erasmus did not appear, and Luther’s bombast carried the day. In fact, according to Zweig, Luther by that time had had second thoughts but had lost control of his troops.

Thus inflammatory rhetoric carried the day, and the humanistic idea of the unity of mankind gave way to newly resurgent nationalism and the power politics laid out by Machiavelli in Il Principe. Zweig saw parallels between Europe in the time of Erasmus and Martin Luther and Europe in the 1930s.

Where are we headed now? Are we ever going to be ready to give peace a chance?

It occurs to me that I should say that I don't intend to characterize modern Lutherans as being in the mold of Martin Luther, either in character or in all aspects of his theology. Pace!

Book Review: CASUALTY OF WAR: A CHILDHOOD REMEMBERED

Casualty of War: A Childhood Remembered, by

Luisa Lang Owen

College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press (2003)

The early chapters of Luisa Lang Owen’s memoir are an idyllic pastorale. The writing, rich with sensuous detail, transports a reader to a rural village in pre-war -- pre-WWII, that is -- Yugoslavia, Potiski Sven Nikola, as the name appears in one of its many spellings, depending on the language used to give the name. (I select this one to use because it is easiest to manage with the alphabet of my native English.) The story of Luisa’s childhood begins with an early memory of her mother, moving out from there to other family members, and finally taking in the greater village, for the village was as much a casualty of war as the author’s childhood.

Several pages in the beginning of her story dwell lovingly on trees – the sour cherry tree in grandfather’s garden, the blue plum tree, a sweet cherry tree in a neighbor’s garden, the sweet apple, the apricot, the mulberry – each one an individual.

Our plum tree not only had a collective identity; it was itself and not interchangeable with any other trees of its kind. It was something larger than its name or anything one could say about it. Like every tree in the garden, that which it was could not fit into a name.

There were also in the village “misplaced” trees, trees that “did not know how to belong,” those we would now call non-native species, but such were rare. Most trees in the village belonged, as did every inhabitant in the child’s eyes, regardless of ethnicity or religion, all of the villagers rooted in the earth, or what the author calls the “sacred ground.” Owen begins by describing the trees, using them as an introduction to the people and their larger surroundings.

[The trees] were part of our lives. Around them children would play games until late at night, and under them people would sit on benches and talk late into the night.

“I was aware of a feeling I could not name,” she writes, “which felt like belonging.”

Owen’s family were ethnic Germans, but the little girl learned to greet everyone in her village according to their own language.

In conversations with people from different ethnic groups one accommodated according to the language skills of others. Simple words and gestures expressed our shared experiences quite well even among those who did not speak each other’s languages.

There were Catholic and Serb Orthodox churches in the village and a small house that served as the Lutheran prayer house. While there was no synagogue in the village, there were a few Jewish families (the “lady pharmacist” was Jewish), along with Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, Slovaks and Gypsies. No one was a stranger. In this the people were better integrated than the trees, it seems, for the child does not recognize any of the human inhabitants as “misplaced” during the early years of her own life.

Nearly everyone within its orbit lived in the village, even those who farmed or worked on the farms.

In summer people left the village hours before dawn so that the early morning light might find them at their destination ready to work. The wagons returned late in the evening, bringing the smell of hay with them and raising the dust on the road.

That dust on the roads and on the village streets! Like the people themselves, “[t]he earth was at home in the village.” In the streets it was “soft warm powder, ankle-deep, so friendly to bare feet.”

I had a very visceral and personal feeling for these early pages, for the soft dust and fruit trees and gardens that brought back my own grandmother’s poor suburban homestead on the edge of Springfield, Ohio. I recall vividly, even now, the soft grey dust of my grandparents’ road that felt as gentle as talcum powder to my bare feet, and I relive again my joyous delight in being allowed to spend every day barefoot in that poor neighborhood where many of the other children had no shoes and where I was permitted to climb, like a monkey, all the fruit trees in the backyard and ordered to come down only when an oncoming storm began to throw the branches about, quite deliciously, tossing me as if I were on a boat at sea. My grandmother’s chickens and my feeding and egg-collecting tasks; an old outhouse surrounded by hollyhocks, reached by means of a grapevine-covered brick path, the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern; a ragged pony belonging to neighbor children; dogs friendly and otherwise.... 

Eighty pages into Owen's story the tranquil cocoon of her rural village life begins to unravel, never to be mended. Before getting into disruption, nightmare, and tragedy, however, I want to pause to remark on what gives this book such power.

The author’s story, however it were told, would be interesting, even compelling, but the way she tells it is fascinating, riveting and, despite the nightmare chapters, in many places quite magical. We see the village as it was in the 1930s, described through the eyes of a child. Owen’s remarkable memory for detail is central to her enterprise, but her writing goes beyond objective factual description, recalling for us how that lost world felt and smelled and tasted to her, and then she goes beyond that, as well, animating the whole. Trees, for example, have as much personality as human beings. One sweet cherry tree is noted for its “generosity,” while another is “pinched and proud.” Houses, rooms, and the least small object are presented with feelings and attitudes and personalities of their own. A chocolate rooster wrapped in foil is “conscious of being watched.” When the little girl gives in to temptation and eats the chocolate rooster, experiencing immediate sadness for its absence, the rooster’s mate, the foil-wrapped chocolate hen, “shifted her position and turned her head from side to side as if to get a better look at the cause of my dismay.” A large corner house in the neighborhood “extended its familiar look like an invitation.” The animation of an entire life-world continues throughout the book, but in the beginning it is particularly effective because it draws a reader immediately into the child’s perspective, into her sense of herself at the center of her world.

Then one spring adults lower their voices and begin speaking in hushed tones of war. Tension builds in families and between ethnic groups.

I soon noticed that people changed and became distant; some were unfriendly. They did not smile and they greeted grudgingly. Instead of being themselves, they suddenly became Serb, German, Hungarian, Slovak, Jew, and Gypsy.

They put on, she says, “the mask of generality,” which I read as an impersonal, distant facial expression. The girl wonders if the people with those faces, avoiding eye contact with others, have not already lost themselves. Certainly, they have lost their feeling of belonging together, the feeling of village integrity, and in that greater loss it is inevitable that the child will eventually lose her innocence. Is it possible to be innocent and to feel one does not belong?

Soon men are called up for the armed services, Jewish families disappear overnight, and a little girl who always greeted her in Hungarian vanishes along with the others.

Her empty house, turned inward, like all the other abandoned houses, bore a reflection of the missing. But such houses were no longer part of anyone’s home, and not even the carelessly drawn star could claim them. Like accusing monuments to the violence that diminished us, they recalled the lost integrity of the village.

Luisa’s parents argue. Rationing goes into effect. An uncle disappears, captured and tortured for a month, escapes and returns home, crying out every afternoon, as if from a nightmare, from the pain of his frostbitten feet. In the fall of 1944 ethnic Germans receive warnings to flee, and half of them do, but no one really has any idea what to expect, whether it is better to stay in familiar surroundings or flee before invading soldiers. Luisa’s father, a blacksmith, was conscripted long before to shoe horses for the German army, and no one has heard from him.

Outsiders are in control. Russians come first, invading the village as conquerors. Women are afraid to sleep in their own beds and seek overnight hiding places with their children. Radios are confiscated, as is livestock. Then the fearful Russians depart, leaving Serbs in control of the village. Luisa’s family, as ethnic Germans, lose all rights to citizenship and property. There are public executions. Finally, in January 1945, when the girl is nine years old, her family and other ethnic Germans remaining in the village are ordered into farm wagons for deportation. They have no idea where they will be taken or what fate awaits them.

Luisa’s mother and grandmother, grandfather, great-uncle and –aunt struggle to remain together. It is the beginning of a three-year nightmare, lasting until 1948, an experience of brutality, forced labor, starvation, and – for many – death. Luisa’s ability to speak the language of their captors comes to the family’s aid more than once, as does her knowledge of Serbian folk songs, but straw on the floor of an empty, unheated building makes a poor bed, and a single piece of bread begged from a house with plenty does not go far to feed five people. Whenever groups of people are separated and moved, as happens several times, there is terror greater than that of starvation. At one point her mother becomes ill, seems ready to die, and refuses to open her eyes or leave her bed for days, but somehow during that speechless time the strong woman regained her resolve and went on, doing everything she could to keep her family alive.

I will not attempt to cover here the three years in the concentration camp so vividly described in Luisa Owen’s book. As in the earlier chapters, those nightmare years, too, are recalled from the perspective of the young child the author was at the time. With a child’s instinctive hunger for information, all the greater in this situation where survival depends on it, the girl observes everything and everyone around her. She has lost her innocence, her sense of belonging, her village, and any possible feeling of safety and security, but she and her family are determined to out-wait the nightmare, hopeful (if not sure) that it cannot last forever.

Any story of survival, because the teller has obviously survived, is positive in that it is an escape from death. The author of Casualty of War eventually came to America, achieved university degrees, became a professor of art education, raised a son, and now delights in grandchildren. These sources of happiness were surely not dreamed of by a little girl in a concentration camp under Tito’s reign of terror.

And yet, the losses always remain, as much a part of life as everything gained.

Longings for the past would often emerge unexpectedly. On weekend rides in the country, for instance, I would want us to stop at a farmhouse; I wanted to meet “real” people, and I was convinced they would have sheep cheese and yogurt for sale. On late autumn days, the crisp air would conjure familiar scents, the excitement of a disznótor [pig slaughtering, followed by sausage making]. Though such memories were comforting, invigorating, they informed, at the same time, that the feeling of home was elsewhere and far away.

Reading this book, I had a strong, painful sense not only of a world lost but of similar thefts of childhood being exacted throughout our world today. Owen’s writing ensures that whatever she describes will have great impact. It is also true, however, that the context in which one reads a book affects one’s reception of it, and the splintering of one integrated Yugoslavian village into religious and ethnic groups who can no longer trust each other – to me, sadly, that reads like a microcosm of much of our world of 2014.

Does it, or does it not, “take a village to raise a child”? The child in this book survives years of unspeakable brutality and horror, thanks to her immediate family, but the secure feeling of belonging, of being part of a meaningful whole, is never regained. In our own small village of Northport, there are those who feel secure in their belonging, those who hold apart, and those who feel “misplaced,” despite their best efforts. I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that we are immeasurably fortunate to be here.

[Note: the author is the mother of Erik Owen of Northport.]

How's Your Hungarian?

All I can tell of this book’s contents by looking into it comes from the photographs and other illustrations. On the title page, for instance, there is the word “Natura,” which is clearly the publisher’s name but also gives a clue to what’s inside the book. And sure enough, in the many pages following there are photographs of forests and trees, mountains and fields, wildflowers and fish, even microscopic aquatic fauna.

Below is a graphic representation I take to show different microclimates at varying altitudes, but there are also photographs of human dwellings and other buildings.

(I'll spare you the maps and other graphs.) Searching online, I find that this Hungarian edition (1981) is available in six libraries around the world, and I can find information on Lake Balaton, claimed to be “Europe’s largest freshwater lake.” That linked site provided hints to more of what I found in the book, e.g., the medieval ruins. Or do these ruins look even older than the Middle Ages? Prehistoric, perhaps? The answer lies open in the text, but I cannot tell what I’m looking at. I see cultivation of grapes, fishing, logging, charming thatched cottages and old-fashioned farm wagons. But how much of this is historical, and how much is current?

It was not myself-as-reader but myself-as-avid bookseller who snatched up this book! Now, to find a bookstore customer who reads Hungarian!

Selling a book in German on -- I’m guessing -- housekeeping will probably be easier. Here it is:

Wouldn’t Neuzeit be “new times," implying modern? I’m sure the maid’s uniform was modern when the book was first published, but the maid and the little table set up for coffee (not tea: this is Germany, not England) look quite early 20^th century to me. I would do better picking out a word here and there except that they are all in the old script. Ah, but here’s part of the title illuminated by an online search: Domestic Science!

Now if anyone is still with me – or has impatiently scrolled down to see if there was going to be a point to all this – that person might be asking, Is she out of her mind? So here is the place where I remind that reader that I have been a bookseller for over 21 years. Surely now you see that your question is rhetorical, don’t you?

How Others See Us: “America,” the European Myth

". . . like the first morning . . ."

John Locke started it, with his Second Treatise on Government. “In the beginning,” he wrote, “all the world was America.” He wasn’t talking about a particular continent or set of continents but about human social life before the establishment of “civil society,” before established cultural traditions and legal concepts.

What would human life conducted in a pure “state of nature” look like? Where Thomas Hobbes imagined the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” the constant warfare of “all against all,” and Jean-Jacques Rousseau envisioned “noble savages,” unspoiled rather than deformed by civilization, Locke (neither as pessimistic as Hobbes nor as idealistic as Rousseau) took a middle ground. Acknowledging and welcoming the advantages and protections conferred by civil society, he nevertheless saw their beginnings in the family, nature’s “first society,” with responsible adults working together to improve property and nurture children, long before there were laws or cultural traditions in place.

Locke’s idea of “all the world as America” fired the European imagination, as did the American frontier itself. Long into the 20^th century, Hollywood Western adventure stories were as popular overseas as in the United States, Western movies even at times copied and filmed in European countries (“spaghetti Westerns”), and that fascination is not over yet. Epic literary tales like Jim Harrison’s Revenge find huge audiences abroad. “Jim Harrison?” exclaimed a bookseller I asked in Paris about French translations of our friend’s books. “J’adore Jim Harrison!”

What do most European tourists want to see when they visit the United States? New York, the Grand Canyon, Disney World, and Hollywood. A few may fly over Chicago and get an idea of Lake Michigan, but it is the open, empty expanses of land, the young mountain ranges, the soaring skyscrapers, and the Disney fantasy that best answer European preconceptions of our land.

I was reminded of the myth of America when I picked up Paris la Grande, by Philippe Meyer. Ah, Paris! Surely the antithesis of Chicago, wouldn’t you imagine? But immediately in the opening section the author astounds me by writing of Paris as “cette espèce d’Amerique où chacun peut espérer donner à sa vie un nouveau départ.” Paris, he is saying, is a kind of America -- because (and here comes the myth) one can come to Paris to start a new life on a blank slate! Coming either to Paris or to America, he believes, you can leave small town traditional life and escape your neighbors’ eyes and judgment!

When I was in graduate school, a friend from Ethiopia who had had a very French education up to that point was astonished to find that large numbers of Americans, like “country people” anywhere in the world, maintained attachments to specific regions and landscapes and to life in far-flung towns and villages. My love of Michigan amazed her. Why would I, an educated person, identify so strongly with a particular section of the country? Wasn’t “America” a more universal concept and therefore a more appropriate object for my devotion? She was also surprised to find intense religious feeling among so many Americans. Before coming here, she had imagined America as a land where inhabitants looked only to the future, relying on nothing but science and law, feeling no inhibitions and respecting no traditions.

But that’s just it. Even America is not “America” in that sense – it is not, that is, the mythic “America” -- and it never was. Before Europeans “discovered” the continent, different peoples called different regions of the land home, and while some of them moved from one place to another with the seasons, it rarely occurred to any of them to leave the familiar entirely, without any reason, and strike out for parts unknown. Tradition is part of human life. Our first attachments can only be local.

Paris has its own traditions, and, like Chicago or Cincinnati, many of its neighborhoods are small towns in themselves, peopled by inhabitants who immigrated to the capital from an outlying province or a foreign country, bringing with them their food and customs. Like New York, Paris can be provincial, too, and much of its charm lies in that fact. Meyer recognizes as much, I learn as I read on, but it is still the possibility of anonymity in the metropolis that attracts him and, he believes, attracts most people who come to make their home there.

Isn’t the possibility of freedom in anonymity the attraction of most cities as opposed to small towns? I don’t see it as particular to Paris, much though I love Paris. Meyer’s migration from Versailles to Paris has much in common with Alfred Kazin’s escape from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and I found the delightful feeling of freedom myself in Cincinnati, where I could roam the streets and neighborhoods like a tourist no one knew (like Chiang Yee’s “silent traveler”) and then go home alone to my little student apartment to read and write.

Paris as “America”! Leave it to a Frenchman to come up with such a startling and controversial concept!

Can you imagine a French family coming to live in Northport with the expectation of escaping neighbors’ eyes? In our little village? And yet, ain’t we America, too?

* * * 

Another local note: En cherchant le vert du commencement du printemps ce matin, je l’ai trouvé! Not yet visible from the road, the first wild leeks are up an inch or two in the woods.

Spring is beginning to spring

One Day’s Surprises (Each Day Brings Its Own)

Yes, today is Election Day, and we have no way of knowing how the end of the day will tally up, but I thought a very brief post on another subject might be welcome. After all, politics—don’t you need a break once in a while? Especially after the weeks of robo-calls and slick mini-posters in your mail?

Life in a bookstore is always full of surprises, and I feel lucky to have a “job” that is like that, rather than one in which every day is like every other. On any given day, I don’t know who will walk in the door, what books will be selected, what conversations will take place. Also—and I say this not to solicit more but simply because it’s a fact—a small-town bookseller collects a certain amount of booty. That’s “booty” as in pirate talk, not as in shake-your.

On Saturday last, for example, a friend from Cedar, just back from a four-week vacation in Poland, stopped by to share stories of his trip and brought back a couple of delightful and surprising gifts. One of the towns he had visited was Torun, and one of the gifts Tom brought was a little jar of rose honey. Rose petals are visible, and the honey, he says, is supposed to taste of roses.

I wasn’t familiar with the name Torun but quickly learned that it has more than one claim to fame. Two of those claims are held in the second gift, a gingerbread cookie in the shape of a portrait of Copernicus. Torun is both the birthplace of Copernicus and the gingerbread capital of Europe.


Somewhere in my dim memory banks is an association of Poland with cherries. I wonder if the orchards in Poland look anything like ours at this time of year. Maybe not. I think Tom said it was very cold there already. He might even have had snow while he was there.

What will Election Day bring to Northport and to Dog Ears Books? As David likes to say, “Who will be there, who will we see there, what’ll be the big surprise?”