Excellent and Unfortunately All Too Relevant

 

I am a serious consumer of

audio books. I mentioned recently that I was listening to Michener's The Source-- such a good book but in light of all that's going on in the so-called Holy Land these days, I began to find it too grim for bed time listening.

So I decided to shift my attention to ancient Rome and downloaded Robert Grave's I, Claudius. I've read it several times, beginning when I was in high school. It was one of a few books in the house and at the time, it seemed a bit racy.

I also saw the TV version but found it difficult to follow.

This audio version, however, is perfect. The reader is a delight to listen to, and somehow, over the course of many hours, it was easy to keep track of the various characters. Listening was compelling.

Except for one thing. The novel shows how Rome

sank from a republic to a dictatorship, culminating in the rule of insane, depraved Caligula. Senators had the choice of assenting to his whims or being banished or executed.

Somehow it all seemed familiar.

On Foot to Constantinople

One thing leads to another and, as so often happens, one book leads to another. After a recent re-read of Mary Norris's delightful Greek to Me, I took her suggestion and began reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts.

In 1933, Fermor, an eighteen year old English student, decided to leave his studies behind and to walk from Holland to Constantinople. (The book was written over forty years later, based on the journals he'd kept.) 

The prose is lush and delightful--a wonderous travelogue of Europe between WWI and II. It's a bygone world, where a young man can travel on foot and be greeted by hospitality at every turn--from the inn keeper who gives him a room because he looks tired to the town jail that will provide a warm, unlocked cell and breakfast to the workhouse run by monks, with its communal dormitory and breakfast provided after a stint of woodchopping.

It reminds me a bit of Richard Halliburton's popular travel books--I was quite enamored of them when I was young -- but Fermor is a much better writer as well as being a deeper thinker.

I'm reading the book slowly, pausing to look online for pictures of some of the places he describes--the Dutch polders and landscapes, the picturesque towns, the castles along the Rhine . . .we followed some of that same route back in '70 on our motorcycle trip and I could see it as he must have done from the barge that gave him a lift--without so much traffic and rather idyllic. 

But it was 1933-- in Germany "the town was hung with National Socialist flags and the window of an outfitter's shop next door held a display of Party equipment: swastika armbands, daggers for the Hitler Youth, blouses for Hitler Maidens and brown shirts for grown up S.A. men..." There were pictures of the Fuhrer in various manly poses and the author recounts hearing a woman say, "What a beautiful man!" to which her companion agreed, adding that Hitler had wonderful eyes.

At the same time, Fermor encountered many who were openly opposed to the Nazi movement, "in different ways and for different reasons.  It was a time," he goes on to say, " when friendships and families were breaking up all over Germany."

How familiar this all sounds. I can only hope our country continues to move away from the cult of personality that is destroying the GOP as a rational (and necessary) conservative voice. But I digress . . .

Meanwhile I'll keep traveling by way of this book of riches, secure in the knowledge that I have the second part of the v0yage standing by. 

 

The Prescient Wisdom of Douglas Adams

The Hitchhiker's Guide and the other four books of the trilogy ( it's complicated) have been a part of my life for almost forty years now, mostly in recordings of the radio and television versions as well as by recorded books. Recently I began re-reading this amazing synthesis of extreme silliness and deep wisdom. There's always something new to discover.

What popped out at me yesterday was Adams's description of Zaphod Beeblebrox: "... good- timer, (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terrible bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.

"President? No one had gone bananas, not in that way at least.

"Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was ideal presidency fodder.*

* " . . . The President in particular is very much a figurehead -- he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it."

At least our current distraction has only the one head and two arms. I don't think I could bear two heads like that.