It was the lure of treasure that had drawn Belzoni to Egypt. But he made perhaps his greatest find—and certainly his most spectacular—only after he crossed paths with another European traveler who was motivated almost solely by curiosity and wanderlust.

That find would lead to the next breakthrough in the deciphering race. Once again, it would involve a collaboration between Belzoni and William Bankes, this one close on the heels of their obelisk adventure.

In the years from about 1810 to 1820, Belzoni and Bankes were among a handful of Europeans dashing back and forth across Egypt in a kind of high-stakes scavenger hunt. The lives of both men changed, and the whole deciphering story veered onto a new track, when they met a tall, bearded, half-starved figure who spun tales of his travels that might have come from The Thousand and One Nights.

Jean Louis Burckhardt was a traveler almost without peer. Swiss-born, he had left Europe in 1809, at age twenty-five. He would never return. He spent his first few years abroad in Syria, where he immersed himself in the study of Arabic. Soon Burckhardt spoke so well that, with the help of a thick beard and a turban and robe, he could pass as a local. As Sheikh Ibrahim ibn Abdullah, he set off to explore the Middle East and Africa, unarmed, unaccompanied, and endlessly curious.

He would become one of the first Westerners to visit Mecca and the first to see Petra, in Jordan. (As we have seen, Bankes was the first to capture Petra in drawings.) The year 1813 found him deep in the Nubian desert, some seven hundred miles south of Cairo. This was harsh, lawless territory, more than a hundred miles beyond the most remote spot that any of Napoleon’s savants had reached.

Burckhardt was chasing down rumors of an ancient, neglected temple on the banks of the Nile. He found it.

---

Carved into a cliffside in the forbidding land then called Nubia stood six enormous statues, three on each side of an entranceway that vanished into the rock. (The site is about 170 miles south of present-day Aswan.) For anyone approaching overland, the temple complex was hard to spot until the last moment, but from the river it was impossible to miss. Inside, Burckhardt saw more carvings, painted figures, and countless hieroglyphs.

He explored a bit and then turned to leave. As he clambered back up the cliffs from the river, he happened to glance toward the south. Suddenly he saw four immense statues, far bigger than the colossal statues he had already found. These, too, were carved from the sandstone cliffs, but sand now buried them almost completely.

Burckhardt had nearly missed what would prove to be one of Egypt’s grandest “lost” temples; what he had found first was a kind of secondary, companion temple.

He ran closer. The head and chest of one statue stood above the sand. The next statue in line was almost completely hidden. “Of the other two,” Burckhardt wrote, “the bonnets only appear.”

Those “bonnets,” it would turn out, were crowns; the statues depicted pharaohs—more accurately, onepharaoh four times. Burckhardt climbed his way up to the one statue whose head lay exposed. Here was “a most expressive, youthful countenance, appearing nearer to the Grecian model of beauty” than any other statue in Egypt.

Burckhardt measured the distance from shoulder to shoulder—seven yards. He measured an ear from top to bottom—one yard, four inches. There was no way to tell if the statues showed standing figures or seated ones. If they were standing, Burckhardt guessed, they were sixty-five or seventy feet tall. What was this place?

If only the sand could be cleared away, Burckhardt suggested, “a vast temple would be discovered, to the entrance of which the above colossal figures probably serve as ornaments.”

---

Burckhardt found Abu Simbel in 1813. Two years later, in the winter of 1815, in Cairo, he and two new acquaintances spent many an evening chattering away excitedly about the fabulous, inaccessible temple that Burckhardt had seen.

They made a conspicuous trio, not least because at the time Europeans in Cairo were rare. The tall, golden-haired man was William Bankes, the wealthy English collector who had found the obelisk at Philae. His huge companion was Belzoni, the strongman-turned-archaeologist who had helped Bankes ship the obelisk home. Both men tended to defer to Burckhardt, the most experienced traveler of the group. Burckhardt spun tales of disguises and beatings and robberies and narrow escapes. But his listeners clamored especially for tales of Abu Simbel. What riches might lie under the sand?

Edward Dolnick, The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode The Rosetta Stone

1

Friendship is a kind of commitment. In a commitment you assume responsibility for another person. Here is how:

Say, it’s 2AM, your car breaks down on a highway in the wrong part of town. Who do you call? You call your friend, yes? If he picks up and says, I’m sorry, I can’t come rescue you because I am watching The Squid Game, well, he is not your friend, yes? And if you are that friend, and you get that call, well, you get out of bed, climb in your car and go rescue your friend, yes? Unless he is NOT your friend, in which case you hang up and continue watching The Squid Game. Yes?

So friendship does come with responsibility. Yes?

2

Now, assume you learn, in the course of ordinary conversation, that your friend runs all red lights on principle.

Perhaps he does this because he feels that traffic rules are a tyrannical imposition by The Government; or, perhaps he has read on internet that there is no statistical evidence that stopping at a red light prevents accidents and wishes to prove that that is the case (I am not sure why anyone would do this, but let’s assume, we are speaking hypothetically about some avowed mathematician); or, perhaps, unlike you, he does not wish to live forever, but wants to take chances with his fate.

For whatever reason, he does not stop at red lights.

Given that you know this, would you still be willing to rescue him at 2AM when he calls you to tell you that, when running a red light downtown Detroit, he had a collision with a car full of gangstas, is bleeding, the other party appears dead, soon the police arrive, come get him out of this jam? Or would you look for a polite way to exit the relationship?

3

Not vaccinating is just like running red lights.

Anyone who does not vaccinate, like that fellow running red lights, puts himself at risk; and puts at risk other people.

If he does not vaccinate because he read something somewhere on internet, he is stupid. There is a vast amount of clear evidence that vaccinating is the right course of action. If your friend does not vaccinate despite reading it, he is an idiot. Do you want to assume responsibility for an idiot?

And it is worse: he is putting others at risk. He is anti-social. Do you want to be a friend of a person who puts others at risk? Think about it.

The answer is as clear as daylight. That person should not be your friend.

Lord Vetinari sighed again. He did not like to live in a world of heroes. You had civilisation, such as it was, and you had heroes.

“What exactly has Cohen the Barbarian done that is heroic?” he said. “I seek only to understand.”

“Well… you know … heroic deeds …”

“And they are … ?”

“Fighting monsters, defeating tyrants, stealing rare treasures, rescuing maidens… that sort of thing,” said Mr. Betteridge vaguely. “You know … heroic things.”

“And who, precisely, defines the monstrousness of the monsters and the tyranny of the tyrants?” said Lord Vetinari, his voice suddenly like a scalpel – not vicious like a sword, but probing its edge into vulnerable places.

Mr. Betteridge shifted uneasily. “Well… the hero, I suppose.”

“Ah. And the theft of these rare items … I think the word that interests me here is the term ”theft“, an activity frowned on by most of the world’s major religions, is it not? The feeling stealing over me is that all these terms are defined by the hero. You could say: I am a hero, so when I kill you that makes you, de facto, the kind of person suitable to be killed by a hero. You could say that a hero, in short, is someone who indulges every whim that, within the rule of law. would have him behind bars or swiftly dancing what I believe is known as the hemp fandango. The words we might use are: murder, pillage, theft and rape. Have I understood the situation?”

“Not rape. I believe,”said Mr. Betteridge, finding a rock on which he could stand. “Not in the case of Cohen the Barbarian. Ravishing, possibly.”

“There is a difference?”

“It’s more a matter of approach, I understand.” said the historian. “I don’t believe there were ever any actual complaints.”

Terry Pratchett, The Last Hero

1

This year’s Chopin competition brings forth a whole crop of absolutely brilliant pianists. No wonder the jury admitted 12 to final stage, instead of the usual 10. I, too, wanted to hear all of them.

And several who got dropped earlier. My own bet for the first prize, Ms Joanna Goranko, whom I once heard in Duszniki playing an absolutely unbelievable Liszt’s second Rhapsody (for the first time in my life, an artist — a willowy, girlish 18 year old — made me realize this was in fact a good piece of music, unbelievable!) — well, she, this artist — Ms Goranko — was eliminated in the first stage!

Grrrr!

I so wanted to hear more of her! But she was not eliminated unfairly: 2021 is just an impossible year. 2021 is the year of astronomical events: comets, supernovae. When you are against astonishing phenomena like Armelini, Sorita, and Kobayashi, what can you do but roll over and beg for mercy?

It’s just an unfair year.

2

What is it about the Japanese and the Mazurkas?

Or, at any rate, these two? Sorita and Kobayashi, graduates from the same school, where, being only one year apart in school, they had the same teachers (and sometimes played four hands); perhaps the source of their mazurka genius must be sought in their Hogaku-In, in some unknown professor hiding there? They call them pedagogues in Poland, using the Greek word meaning the person (usually the trusted family slave) who led the student on his way to school. (I.e., the person whose whole purpose in life was the education of the child).

All great pianists are either star performers or pedagogues. The latter are responsible for everything and… are practically invisible. I once heard a renowned pedagogue give a rare recital, and it absolutely blew me away — I never heard anything like that on stage till that night. But she would rather teach.

I know another intimately. Her performance of Bartok’s music for Piano and Percussion is the best ever. The only people who ever get to hear her play are her students.

A pity, but thank God for them all the same.

3

So, there in Hogaku-In, hides the true genius, the spiritus movens, behind all this, the person who taught the two how to play the mazurka.

The mazurka is an oddball dance: it is a lively dance in triple meter, with, says wikipedia, “strong accents unsystematically placed on the second or third beat”. All nations in the world can be divided into those who dance it and those who do not. (“In Cape Verde the mazurka is revered as an important cultural phenomenon played with acoustic bands led by a violinist and accompanied by guitarists”).

(The mazurka determines membership in a secret society of hooded Templars).

In The Leopard, Angelica asks Il Principe to dance the mazurka with her, and he… refuses, suggesting a waltz instead — the mazurka, he explains was too dangerous to dance for an older (but not yet entirely dead) man with a 20 year old earth goddess (lest, we understand, he falls in love with her). In Polish music schools, pedagogues make their piano students dance the mazurka before they play it.

Did their pedagogue make Sorita and Kobayashi dance it?

Well, their mazurkas are incredible. All that apposition, contrariness, complexity, all that growling, the discontented, griping, grouching mumbling; they way the dance keeps slipping out of hand and into formal experiments in pure music; my God, I never, until this day, thought the mazurka was a great art form.

I do now.

4

I shared the Sorita recital with F and she wrote back that sonatas were not her favorite. (His sonata in b-flat is like nothing else I have ever heard).

And then, upon some reflection, and forcing herself to relisten, that she feels embarrassingly deficient for being so insensitive.

This is Europe for you.

An American would turn it into a joke; maybe say something about being an uncouth gringo; or tell a funny joke about the stuck up elites; but an European feels that to be a worthy person, a cultured, cultivated person; he/she must appreciate established art. They know that to develop certain tastes, education is needed; and therefore assume that a person who does not have those tastes is uneducated. And he/she does not want to be uneducated.

But that is really backwards.

While education is needed to hone a taste, its success is not guaranteed. Opticians know a lot about how the eye sees things; and what lenses to prescribe to fix some problems of the seeing process; but virtually nothing about the complex machinery behind the mere seeing; the deeper wiring behind the eye, the machinery which “sees” textures, contrasts, brushstrokes, murk and luminosity. Terry Prachett, of all people, makes a great point about it: to a wizard, he says, “what is so interesting about rocks and trees? there is no writing on them!” He means that there are people, he calls them wizards, who see the labels, “look this is a rock”; “this is a tree”; but who don’t see the leaves, the bark, the lichen, the golden sunlight filtering through the canopy, the mysterious shadows in which something lurks.

In other words, you can lead horse to water.

If, like me, you have had the education to learn it, and the sensitivity to absorb the learning, then, your ability to experience rapture while listening to Sorita’s growling sonata; or Kobayashi’s incredible op 28 no. 14 (at time stamp 32:32); is a source of profound joy; and the corresponding inability, should be a cause of sadness. Not pride or or shame.

Elif Batuman does a very commendable satire of the modern Literature Department. She does explain she was there only to make a living while working on her first novel. Still one puzzles. Could I have put up with several years of that? I can’t imagine myself putting up with the nonsense of the Babel Conference (“Babel in California”) for more than polite 30 minutes.

But perhaps she found it easier than I would. Some of the content of her work clearly meant something to her.

At the end of the term, Matej and I had agreed to collaborate on a presentation about Babel. We met one cold, gray afternoon at a dirty metal table outside the library, where we compared notes, drank coffee, and went through nearly an entire pack of Matej’s Winston Lights, which, I learned, he ordered in bulk from an Indian reservation. We settled on a general angle right away, but when it came to details, we didn’t see eye to eye on anything. For nearly an hour we argued about a single sentence in “The Tachanka Theory”: a story about the transformation of warfare by the tachanka, a wagon with a machine gun attached to the back. Once it is armed with tachanki, Babel writes, a Ukrainian village ceases to be a military target, because the guns can be buried under haystacks.

When it started to rain, Matej and I decided to go into the library to look up the Russian original of the sentence we disagreed about: “These hidden points—suggested, but not directly perceived—yield in their sum a construction of the new Ukrainian village: savage, rebellious, and self-seeking.” Even once we had the Russian text, though, we still disagreed about the meaning of “hidden points.” Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long, but I remember Matej saying irritably, “You’re making it sound as if he’s just adding things up, like he’s some kind of double-entry bookkeeper.”

“That’s exactly right,” I snapped. “He is a double-entry bookkeeper!”

“Rereading this story now, I can’t see what we could have been debating for so long”.

I can’t either.

In fact, I don’t seem to understand what these two were saying to each other.

But perhaps this explains it: at one point she quotes what she thinks is a beautiful passage — from Babel, about “flies dying in a jar with milky liquid”: Each fly was dying in its own way.

What other heads find beautiful (or interesting, or logical) can be totally inscrutable. Even beautiful heads.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed, Adventures with Russian Books and The People Who Read Them

I read with interest and pleasure your essay on Jesus Abbey (link above).  It occasioned some touching impressions, such as looking up photos online and seeing Ben and Yancey; and the Abbey in snow with a row of gigantic kimchi jars outside.

It so happens that I have been reading a little Korean modern history and generally feeling a little nostalgic for North Asia — I was in extra receptive mood for your paper.

I am not enough of a religion scholar to tell you where the Abbey fits in the tradition of Christian monasticism, but my overall impression is that Catholic monastic communities tend to emphasize either community living and working (where work and prayer are communal) or individual hermitage (where community’s purpose is to create economic basis for a life of quiet, isolated contemplation; you may have seen the film The Great Silence which illustrates an example).  I suppose one narrative I could construct for my biography would be that I was trying to achieve the latter for myself.  The fact that every major religious tradition evolves contemplative orders tells you that there is a genuine human need for such a mode of life; and I suspect we have done a lot of harm to a segment of humanity when we abolished/defunded contemplative orders in the west.  A lot of people now have no alternative but seek employment as librarians and look for a contemplation-substitute in chick-lit.  It was probably both much easier and much more fulfilling to pay one’s dues by communal prayer and the limited prescribed work and then be left in peace for the rest of the day in one’s cell or the monastery garden.

Another common need, which may in fact appeal to a different type of personality altogether, is one of purpose and discipline.  What some find in the reading of a scripture, meditation to understand it, and the effort to shape their life and conduct in accordance with a reflection on what it may or may not impart, others find in… body building.  I do not body-build, per se, but do attend the gym (or at least used to until I built my own here) and so met these people, not all of them men, and my impression is that they do it for the sake of having an overarching purpose, which dictates their eating, sleeping, exercise — whole life really.

I also found very interesting your story of how seminary students weren’t really interested in your father’s innovative thinking about role of religion in life and really preferred to study texts and hone their theological debate.  That, too, is religion. Religion fits in different people’s minds in different ways, not all of them compatible, which is why it is such a powerful construct; but also why internal debates and disagreements within every major religion are inevitable.

A real breakthrough in thinking about religion came, in my view, in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917), where he observed that “scared” is a certain feeling of which some of us are capable in response to some objects and events.  Namely, a sacred tree is a perfectly ordinary tree except that a person, or some people, may perceive it as sacred.  I am certainly capable of that feeling, sometimes in response to objects or events which stand in clear contravention of religious dogma or so called “moral teaching”.  I experience it frequently, but just cannot connect it to any believable theology; and happily resign myself to thinking that my own perceptions of sacredness (as in “peace”, or “beauty” etc.) are valuable in their own right merely because they elevate my life in my own perception.

Thank you for this touching essay. I will probably bask in its pleasure for a few more days.

When talking about future relationships, which will last, indeed, the principal feature of which will be that they will last, women with a past display an extraordinary amount of delusion. It isn’t just victory of hope over experience, it is victory of hope over all available evidence. If something does not work, do it harder.

When talking about past relationships, single women tend to bring up the question: why did it fall apart? They want to know whose fault it was. As if the default condition was that relationships last till death us part; unless one, or both, owners somehow mess up.

But they don’t last, often despite best efforts. My host is 85 and his wife of 58 years, a 78-year woman, has just left him — not for the netherworld or another man, but for the solitude of senility.

50% of all marriages end in divorce; and a far larger proportion of live-in arrangements (80%?); of those that do not, most would in fact be better off broken apart; they vegetate on legal difficulties, or financial straits, or just plain fear of change. Yet no one asks what they should ask: why are those two still together?

Everything in life is temporary. Everything ends.

Then we end.

In the background of the contrary assumption lurks perhaps the recognition of just this. Since everything changes, therefore something permanent is required. Like Mom, but one who will stick around longer. How unlucky these lucky people who have not learned that a mother’s love can also be transient. That it can be not given, or given and then withdrawn. Trust me, even mother’s love is not permanent.

Then there is the matter of the mammalian comfort we seem to experience in the closeness of another. A rather famous poet expressed it in these words:

i walk all day troubled, jostled, laughed at
in the evening I entrust all my anxiety to your eyes
the stars twinkle above us, put your head on my shoulders, things will get better

OK, it sounds better in the original, but only marginally. Poor little me, my life is so hard, comfort me.

Two weak, fearful, unhappy people can be the opposite together. 0 + 0 = 1.

M writes me that she is lonely. To wit:

“I am aware at times of how utterly alone I am in this world. Strange words from a married woman with family and friends. Yet completely true. Can you imagine how this can be?”

Hmmm.

It appears most people in the world complain about loneliness. A fellow who ran a party line — the kind of pay-per-call phone-number you can dial in order to engage in phone-sex by the minute — told me that most of his clients called to talk to his employees about the weather — even though the ladies were there to engage in phone-sex if so desired.

“That’s how lonely people are”, he explained.

Shee-at, says Ordell Robbie in Jacky Brown.

This is paradoxical. Wives and mothers who complain about loneliness? It’s customary to complain about being lonely in a crowd? How can this be? Does this make sense? Does it compute?

Or is it just a feeling, a state of mind, a kind of hallucination?

And if it is, can it be cured? Only through a pill, yes?

After all, if a person feels lonely in a crowd, increasing the size of the crowd would not help. What would then?

A pill blocking some receptor would, that’s what would.

A loneliness pill.

Until then the way to deal with loneliness is the T. E. Lawrence trick: “The trick, my friend, is not to mind that it hurts”.