Wednesday morning I spoke to a class of 5th graders at a magnet school in Little Havana. Some of the students were preparing for a class trip to Brazil over spring break. (The school's lessons are given in English and Portuguese.) I talked about how, as a travel writer, I prepare for a trip, and mentioned that, unlike them, I travel alone, not even taking my wife. I asked if they knew why I prefer to go by myself.
One girl in glasses raised her hand. "Because your wife would spend a lot of money?" she suggested.
I'm off to Ohio (without Hania), coming back here on April 10.
Facebook tells me of friends' birthdays and sometimes - after looking in my copy of A Literary Book of Days - I tell them who they share them with. Recently, I wrote to another ex-travel editor informing him that he was born on the same day as Ovid and Ibsen. He replied: "Yes, some of my great lost travel stories were written in dactylic hexameter and my wife slams doors (but comes back, so far)."
A High Life columnist has got me thinking about human societies. In a recent issue of The Spectator, Taki, the magazine’s resident bon vivant, wrote admiringly of Japan, where life is so agreeable, in his view, because the social fabric is based on respect and good manners. These are the qualities that make for a successful society, Taki claimed, not inclusivity and diversity.
For Americans, the ideas of inclusivity and diversity are almost as sacred as those of freedom and democracy. We are the country made up of people from all countries. Years ago I asked a visiting German journalist what struck him most about the United States, and he said it was the fact that all these people from dramatically different cultures managed to get along, for the most part, and work together for the common good. Animosities that had existed for centuries on other continents disappeared within the confines of the U.S. border.
But now intolerance, and hatred of the Other, seem to be appearing. I say ‘seem’ because these attitudes are definitely being stoked. But it’s got me wondering if people are sadly reverting back to their more primitive natures, becoming peasants again, eyeing the stranger with loaded-gun suspicion. Has the American experiment in human evolution come to a halt? Was the ideal of inclusivity and diversity as utopian and doomed as Communism?
Today is the day people have been asked to bombard the president with postcards. As soon as I heard the idea I liked it, not just because of my feelings toward the commander-in-chief but because of my feelings about postcards. As you would expect of a travel writer, I love them. When my nieces were little, and I was traveling a lot, I sent them postcards from every place I went. My refrigerator is covered with postcards, some received from friends, some purchased by myself. There are Arkansas pigs, farm workers in Cuba, masked revelers in Ecuador, traditionally dressed children in Merida, France’s Canal du Midi, Warsaw’s Aleja Jerozolimskie, as well as a number of cards of old travel posters: Bern, San Sebastian, Holland America Line, Pan American Airways. There is a postcard of Carlos Gardel and one of koalas in a tree.
I love postcards so much that, as soon as I got the cover of my new book, The Joys of Travel, I had it made into 750 postcards. Perhaps I’ll send one to the president, with no message on the back, hoping perhaps he’ll take the hint.
Three Marlins – Cristian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton, and Martin Prado – are playing in the World Baseball Classic (the first two for the United States, the last for Venezuela). Yelich was so excited by the prospect of playing for his country that he accepted the invitation without even realizing he would get paid.
This is not the case with a number of MLB stars, who didn’t want to interrupt their spring training to risk injury playing in intense games. (The WBC is the true World Series.) In the 1950s, Ted Williams interrupted his career to risk death flying fighter planes in the Korean War.
One more reason to be a Marlins fan.
I’ve been writing about Poland (again) and Polish, noting how the language – for all its intimidating obsession with consonants – has a consistency that is a boon to foreigners who try to speak it. Every letter in a Polish word has a purpose, and it doesn’t change from word to word. You may not be capable of pronouncing a word like ‘upwards’ – wzwyz – but at least you know how it should be pronounced (by people raised without fear of alphabet-ending consonant clots).
English is not so accommodating. Rough and dough. Sometimes the pronunciation of a word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence. This morning on the radio I heard a man – clearly not a native English speaker – use ‘attribute’ as a noun (with the accent on the first syllable) when it was obvious from the sentence that he wanted to use it – that he was using it, despite its refusal to comply – as a verb (with the accent on the second). Unless you consult a dictionary, there is no way to know that the word has different pronunciations for its different identities. You have to live amongst people who say ‘attribute’ and ‘attribute’ a lot. My heart goes out to learners of English.