Shadow Flutter

I was in my mid twenties living in the New York City area when I had an epiphany: “I hate this place.”   I had lived there all my life, except for a short hiatus in Rhode Island where I went to college but failed to learn anything except how to smoke dope, drink lots of beer, cut class, and play with coeds.   I was tired of the hustle and bustle that was the metropolitan area, tired of the crime and the endless traffic jams.   There is a reason why the Long Island Expressway is called the world’s largest parking lot.   I was tired of the cost of everything.   I once paid $17 to park my car in a parking garage for two hours while I interviewed for a job, and this was the 70’s.   I can only imagine what it must cost now.  Are there enough zeros? I was tired of the gruff impatience of the denizens of a city who, for some reason, felt the need to refer to their city as a fruit.   Once, while standing in line at a cafeteria, when asked what I ...

A Newsweek description of travel author Patrick Leigh Fermor.  He could be a character in a book. What life has been lived with more élan? At the age of 18, Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople—never “Istanbul” to this irrepressible philhellene—a serendipitous, marathon journey immortalized half a century later in the refulgent prose of  A Time of Gifts  and  Between the Woods and the Water . He has secluded himself silently with Trappist monks, fallen in love and run away with a princess, fought for his country, kidnapped a German general, joined a Greek cavalry charge, and swum the Hellespont. The  Financial Times  considered  Mani , his celebrated travelogue on the southern Peloponnese, and  Roumeli , its counterpart on northern Greece, “two of the best travel books of the century.”

I’m reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in small chunks, enjoying gorgeous prose, wonderful landscape descriptions, and fascinating vignettes about the characters she and her husband meet as they travel through Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, etc.   The book comes in at 1,300 big pages, and has yet to lose my interest.   West had great command of language, an artist's eye for countryside and detail, and a piercing understanding of the passions simmering within the people she meets.    I’d like to share with you parts of a chapter named Two Castles . One castle is a monastery and the other a hospital for those who have contracted tuberculosis.   Both are actual castles converted, but it is the second castle, the hospital, that I’m interested in.   The doctors were competent, even excellent, but they had a very different view of how to treat the physically ill from western doctors.   Here the patients were free to roam around and...