The first man and the last woman I talked to last night at Hania’s Penn alumni gathering mentioned Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The man was from Macedonia, now living in Key Biscayne, and told of his family vacation this summer to Switzerland. “We’d travel three hours and everything would be different,” he said. “Landscape, people, culture. Here you drive five hours to Jacksonville and it’s all the same.”
The woman was from Turkey, now living in Oslo. She expressed skepticism regarding the claim that Norwegians are among the happiest people in the world – a nation of self-contented non-strivers. “People ask you if you’re from east Oslo or west Oslo,” she said, making it sound a bit like Manhattan.
The last person I spoke with, class of ’72, had taken sociology with E. Digby Baltzell, the man credited with popularizing the term WASP. “He’d lecture in a hall in front of 200 students,” the man said, his mind drifting back to those exalted days in west Philadelphia.
