balkan ghosts

somehow, as summer comes on in earnest, i get a strange longing for the balkans. perhaps because my first trip there was a summer thing. or maybe because of finding husband there oh so many summers ago. but whatever it is, i get a kind of balkan yearning this time of year. so when i can't just pick up and head south, i turn to my bookshelves. this time, to rebecca west's epic black lamb and grey falcon, about the journey she took through yugoslavia in the inter-war period.

tho' there is much to take issue with as far as the orientalism of the book is concerned, largely dame west is open to the experiences she has. she's not that fond of the parts of yugoslavia that were part of the austro-hungarian empire and has more of a soft spot for those parts that were under ottoman domination and this i can relate to, since i feel exactly the same. i've read the book before, a couple of times, but i find that this time around, i'm reading it with new eyes - more european ones. i think i understand a lot more of the subtleties of the references to the growing influence of hitler in germany and what that meant in europe at that time.

but one of the things i'm most struck by on this reading is simply how well-read and intellectual she was. and it makes me once again long to have lived in that era. in 1913, she started a long love affair with h.g. wells and even had a child with with him. by the time of the balkan journey in 1938, she was a well-established novelist in her own right and had settled down and married banker henry maxwell andrews, who accompanied her on the journey. ahh, but she lived such an intellectual existence. i long to live that way (maybe minus the tumultuous affairs, tho' on the other hand, maybe not) - a life of high level discussions and thinking and writing about the events of the day. i tell you, 1913 was my ideal year.

but mostly, the book transports me. many of the political issues she describes are still relevant today and the discussions still thought-provoking. i love seeing the marginalia from my previous readings and adding more from this time around. and i long to live that way and travel that way--on trains winding slowly through the balkan countryside and most of all, to have time to think like that. to really think about things and how they're connected and what they mean and how they impact the world. how have we gotten so far from living intellectual lives?

i need the rhythm of a train journey and the erudition of a literary salon. i wonder if i can find that without being in the balkans. it seems somehow impossibly far away.