Life

I’d been looking for well over a year for what I consider to be the most perfect Japanese-made piece of Americana there is. Scouring the internet on any given day turns up maybe 15 or so available, most in various states of disrepair. It’s the object of desire for most any red-blooded millennial male that salivates over things like dive watches and waxed-canvas jackets. The Toyota Land Cruiser FJ60. When the COVID pandemic hit, the used-car market exploded as city-dwellers looked for ways to escape a dreary existence in 500-square-foot apartments. What do you do when you can’t be inside? Load the family into the cruiser and head west, of course. National parks saw record-setting numbers of visitors.

Boris Johnson, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper suggests, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a plastic bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage said that gift as a verb was ‘best avoided’, as it had fallen out of favor with speakers of standard English.

I decided to walk from Athens to Byzantium — Constantinople, the medieval Queen of Cities, lately Istanbul. I had a little red tent and a vision of noble penury that evoked the ghosts of Cyriaco of Ancona (d. 1452) and Paddy Leigh Fermor (d. 2011). My girlfriend said she'd join me later. The lines that now smudge my map look more like the flight of a woozy bluebottle than the traces of a man with a plan. My earliest memories of the trek are melancholy.

‘He who is not a republican at 20 compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after 30, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.’ Thus spake M. Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, a 19th-century French academic jurist whose sentiments, variously phrased, have also been attributed to John Adams, François Guizot and Georges Clemenceau. A generous heart and the ability to learn from experience are very good things, certainly. An even better one is common sense: a native attribute that age does not diminish. Mencken claimed that he had never changed his mind on any matter of importance. Donald Trump said in regard to John McCain that he preferred war heroes who didn’t get captured. Myself, I like thinkers who were right from the beginning —and stayed that way.

A visit to another state should be prefaced by reading one of its poets, so for a trip to Greenville, South Carolina, I chose Henry Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, over Hootie and the Blowfish. ‘Cling to the lowly earth, and be content!’ commanded Timrod, a favorite of Bob Dylan’s. The Nobelist borrowed a few words (‘along yon dim Atlantic line’) from Timrod for ‘Cross the Green Mountain’, an eight-minute Stonewall Jackson-flavored masterpiece he wrote for Ron Maxwell’s Civil War film Gods and Generals (2003). Dylan, an equal opportunity sampler, also filched lines for the song from ‘Come up from the fields father’ by that barbaric yawper of the Union, Walt Whitman.

What is the greatest American airline? Some might argue United, though chances are they’re the ones who haven’t been dragged off after a seating mix-up. Others appreciate Delta for their posturing over Georgia’s voting law — because there’s nothing like being hectored about The Literal End of Democracy from 30,000 feet. If you’re nails-down-a-chalkboard irritating, you might just love Southwest for the cabin crew’s open-mic-night-at-the-Comedy-Cellar patter. All of you are plane wrong. The correct answer is Spirit Airlines. For too long has Spirit been the punchline of hastily written Saturday Night Live jokes. This airline is unapologetically true to itself. With its yellow and black hazard-tape branding, Spirit is for flyers who like to live dangerously.

Tourists take the cable car to the Top of the Rock to pester the monkeys that live at the summit, but the best thing about this clifftop arena is the view. Standing on the cliff edge, gazing down at the big ships traversing the busy strait below, you realize what makes Gibraltar so important. Spain lies behind you, Morocco lies ahead. To your left is the Mediterranean and, on your right, the wild Atlantic. This is the bridgehead between Africa and Europe, the gateway between the Old World and the New. No wonder Britain has always been so determined to hold onto it. Whoever controls the Rock controls this narrow strait and all the traffic that passes through it, about a quarter of the world’s shipping.

'To every thing there is a season,' we read in Ecclesiastes, and summer is the season for seersucker. No fabric is better suited for long summer days. Its lightness reflects the sun. Its pucker ventilates the skin. Rather than avoid the heat, seersucker dresses up for the hot occasion. Summers in New York are infernally hot. Seersucker makes it livable, if not always desirable. Since fashion dictates that seersucker only emerge between Memorial Day and Labor Day — timing that varies as you head south — its absence also makes its return that much more rewarding. As the weather warms, out it comes, radiating the light of summers past.

A friend of mine, a lawyer of radical disposition who typically defends nuns who pour blood upon weapons of war, or peace activists who trespass upon military installations, recently told me of his latest case. He is representing a young person who defaced a statue depicting a Confederate soldier. I told him that while I usually applaud his vandal-defendants, I am not in sympathy with this one. The answer to monuments of which one disapproves is not destruction or removal or whinging about your hurt feelings, but rather the creation and emplacement of new monuments. I don’t mean glorifications of dead politicians or military figures — we’ve had enough of those to last a national lifetime, thank you.

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways for tiny people, though they would have to be quite athletic tiny people, as the openings are three feet off the ground. But they’re not entrances for Tuscan pixies — they’re for selling wine. There are more than 150 buchette del vino dotted around the city and they date back to the 17th century. You’d knock on the door, hand over some money and a bottle, and the mysterious person behind the wall would fill it full of wine. It wouldn’t have been just any old plonk either; the great merchant houses of the city like Frescobaldi, Ricasoli and Antinori, who still make some of Tuscany’s best wines, would sell in this way.

Fifteen years ago, I dusted off my Nantucket Basket, which I’d carried every summer since 1964. To my horror its woven straw was unraveling. The desert climate of Scottsdale, Arizona, where we moved in 2002, had not been kind. When I was a young woman, and received a Nantucket Basket as a gift, I knew it was to be used from Memorial Day until Labor Day. The Baskets have evolved over the last 170 years, from nesting baskets selling for $1.50, to closed baskets used as purses by islanders. Nantucket men wove them in their spare time while serving onboard the South Shoal lightship, off Nantucket. Straw purses are now back for summer. Not that they have ever gone out of style. Many top designers have come out with baskets, including Chanel, Prada and even Hermès.

The instinct to admire and celebrate is as basic to the human psyche as the instinct to worship, to which it is related. In monarchical and aristocratical ages fame came from status and power; the most admired people in society were kings and queens, other royals and military heroes. In the bourgeois-republican age they were statesman of high rank, military men, political authors, poets, popular novelists, the prime donne and primi uomini of the theatrical and operatic stages, and prominent figures in high society. In the modern democratic age they are liberal politicians, best-selling novelists, pop singers, film and television stars, and fashion models: a downward progression that traces the steady descent in the public appreciation of human value and quality.

In the center of Bath a giant obelisk sits in the middle of a little park called Queen’s Square. Standing in the park on a cool but sunny February morning, I realize that despite passing it on countless occasions in the 22 years I lived in the city — from playing bowls on the grass as a child to sheltering behind it to smoke cigarettes as a teenager — I have no idea what it is doing there. A black metal sign informs me that it was erected in 1738 by the Bathonian dandy Beau Nash in honor of Frederick, Prince of Wales. I wonder what Frederick thought about being presented with an obelisk. The sky is darkening. In the 10 minutes I have been sitting there, waiting for a friend with parking troubles, the place has been almost empty. Bath is a tourist town — or at least it was.

Thomas Carlyle, in ‘Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History,’ divided heroes into six categories in order of human greatness as he conceived it: the hero as divinity, as prophet, as poet, as priest, as man of letters and as king, the heroic ruler of men who in Carlyle’s own description is the actual philosopher-king. In the modern world, kings have been replaced by prime ministers, presidents, strongmen and dictators; that is to say, by politicians of one sort or another. No one with the qualifying virtues of such a man would descend to the moral level of a tyrant, while no mere politician is endowed with the wisdom, gifts and virtues either of a kingly philosopher or a philosophic king, whom no democratic electorate would elevate to the office anyway.

It was night when I arrived in Seville. A taxi took me through a maze of winding backstreets then came to an abrupt halt at the head of a pedestrian-only lane. ‘You’ll have to walk from here,’ said the driver. Uncertainly I dragged my suitcase down one dark alley after another, then suddenly came out onto a plaza lined with orange trees. Soaring above me, spotlit against the black sky, was the cathedral steeple. It was a breathtaking sight with its delicately latticed walls of golden stone, so tall I had to tip my head back to see the spire at the top. The cathedral stretched beside it, filling an entire block. Four hundred years have passed since Seville was the greatest and most glamorous city on earth, as glittering and alluring as New York City is today.