Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room. This was morning’s hallowed moment. In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten, and the soul is inspired with faith in the future […]. Some day, incredible though it might seem, spring would come with its birds, its buttercups in the home-field.
― Halldór Laxness, Independent People
In a ghost-written book called The Long Walk, author Rawicz claimed that in 1941 he and six others had escaped from a Siberian Gulag camp and begun a long journey south on foot (about 6,500 km or 4,000 mi), supposedly travelling through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas before finally reaching British India in the winter of 1942.
In 2006, the BBC released a report based on former Soviet records, including statements written by Rawicz himself, showing that Rawicz had been released as part of the 1942 general amnesty of Poles in the USSR and subsequently transported across the Caspian Sea to a refugee camp in Iran, leading the report to conclude that his supposed escape to India never occurred.
In May 2009, Witold Gliński, a Polish World War II veteran living in the UK, came forward to claim that the story of Rawicz was true, but was actually an account of what happened to him, not Rawicz. Gliński’s claims have been severely questioned by various sources. The son of Rupert Mayne, a British intelligence officer in wartime India, stated that in 1942, in Calcutta, his father had interviewed three emaciated men who claimed to have escaped from Siberia. According to his son, Mayne always believed that their story was the same as that of The Long Walk—but telling the story decades later, his son could not remember their names or any details. Subsequent research failed to unearth confirmatory evidence for the story.
Nestled in a copse in a corner of a verdant field in Kisaru, Japan there’s an inviting library built to serve local residents of a farming community. Designed by architect Hiroshi Nakamura, Library in the Earth occupies a space that was once a natural valley filled with construction debris, leaving only flat, dry land above. Rather than imposing another structure upon the already altered landscape, the studio chose to carve a path into the earth leading to ‘Mother Pond,’ the locals’ affectionate term for the pond in the area. The gesture of leaving the upper layer intact in order for the plants and microorganisms to flourish was an acknowledgement of the soil’s role as a life-giver.
Taking the form of a water droplet, the library is accessed by descending to the entrance of a bookshelf-lined corridor. Overhead, living grass hangs from the concrete slab edges which cantilever from the retaining walls, introducing a dampness that changes along with the seasons.
Symbolism is embedded throughout the library’s structure: the way the bookshelves’ vertical frames support each other in mutual reinforcement recalls community strength, and the central skylight reminds readers of their connection to the world above. These thoughtful details encapsulate the project’s essence as “a library that thinks of the earth while being embraced in the wisdom of the earth and human beings.”
Sometimes web surfing serendipity ticks all of the boxes. Regular readers are au fait with my life-long love of cartography, my near obsession with historic travel guides, and my background as an erstwhile history teacher, so you won’t be too surprised that this website is in my wheelhouse.
The Charles Dickens Page allows you to view a number of bird’s eye views of London neighborhoods, as captured by Thomas Sulman in the 1880’s. These maps were originally published in 1886, in a London guidebook by Herbert Fry.
Lately, I’ve been reading travelers’ tales about the difficulty in locating someplace to drop-off trash and recycling while visiting Japan. So, I found this short piece by writer and long-time Japan resident Craig Mod on our cultural impulse to immediately discard the trash we generate illuminating. In Japan, there are few rubbish bins, which encourages individuals to take responsibility for their waste instead of abandoning it. Perhaps owning your garbage promotes a healthier relationship with consumption? “This obsession with the immediate ‘unburdening’ of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world.”
Death Fugue
by Paul Celan
Black milk of morning we drink you evenings
we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease
He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes
He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease
Black milk of dawn we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit
“Conscience”
by
Italo Calvino
translated by Tim Parks
Came a war and a guy called Luigi asked if he could go, as a volunteer.
Everyone was full of praise. Luigi went to the place where they were handing out the rifles, took one and said: ‘Now I’m going to go and kill a guy called Alberto.’
They asked him who Alberto was.
‘An enemy,’ he answered, ‘an enemy of mine.’
They explained to him that he was supposed to be killing enemies of a certain type, not whoever he felt like.
‘So?’ said Luigi. ‘You think I’m dumb? This Alberto is precisely that type, one of them. When I heard you were going to war against that lot, I thought: I’ll go too, that way I can kill Alberto. That’s why I came. I know that Alberto: he’s a crook. He betrayed me, for next to nothing he made me make a fool of myself with a woman. It’s an old story. If you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you the whole thing.’
They said fine, it was okay.
‘Right then,’ said Luigi, ‘tell me where Alberto is and I’ll go there and I’ll fight.’
They said they didn’t know.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Luigi said. ‘I’ll find someone to tell me. Sooner or later I’ll catch up with him.’
They said he couldn’t do that, he had to go and fight where they sent him, and kill whoever happened to be there. They didn’t know anything about this Alberto.
‘You see,’ Luigi insisted, ‘I really will have to tell you the story. Because that guy is a real crook and you’re doing the right thing going to fight against him.’
But the others didn’t want to know.
Luigi couldn’t see reason: ‘Sorry, it may be all the same to you if I kill one enemy or another, but I’d be upset if I killed someone who had nothing to do with Alberto.’
The others lost their patience. One of them gave him a good talking to and explained what war was all about and how you couldn’t go and kill the particular enemy you wanted to.
Luigi shrugged. ‘If that’s how it is,’ he said, ‘you can count me out.’
‘You’re in and you’re staying in,’ they shouted.
‘Forward march, one-two, one-two!’ And they sent him off to war.
Luigi wasn’t happy. He’d kill people, offhand, just to see if he might get Alberto, or one of his family. They gave him a medal for every enemy he killed, but he wasn’t happy. ‘If I don’t kill Alberto,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have killed a load of people for nothing.’ And he felt bad.
Meantime they were giving him one medal after another, silver, gold, everything.
Luigi thought: ‘Kill some today, kill some tomorrow, there’ll be less of them, that crook’s turn is bound to come.’
But the enemy surrendered before Luigi could find Alberto. He felt bad he’d killed so many people for nothing, and since they were at peace now he put all his medals in a bag and went around enemy country giving them away to the wives and children of the dead.
Going around like this, he ran into Alberto.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘better late than never,’ and he killed him.
That was when they arrested him, tried him for murder and hanged him. At the trial he said over and over that he had done it to settle his conscience, but nobody listened to him.
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska.
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”
-Emily Dickinson
Travel Between The Pages 