​Today is a world full of development in fields of Science and Technology by talented and artistic people . Different types of people live in this world. All of them, directly or indirectly have inbuild talents by creative God. 

 A few of them are atheistic while others are theistic. But all humans are the creation of almighty God. People worship God for their good and request God to keep them fit and healthy and to bless them . But they donot worship God with full concentration and attachment. Hindus worship their God in temples,  Muslims worship their God in Mosques, Sikhs worship their God in Gurdwaras while Christians worship their God in Churches. But a very few people are able to find God. This is due to the concentration and love with God and full faith in God . Many people when go to their worship place , they keep on watching their surroundings and other people rather than God . They pay a very few time praying God. Some of them on sitting for long time in worship centre , get bored  and to overcome it they use smartphones to chat , watch videos , play games , phone call their relatives , disturb others who are wholeheartedly worshiping God and conversate with other people around them . If they pay attention towards God and pray them honestly,  they will definitely find God. Children in worship places try learn everything they watch around them and if adults do these things , this will have bad effect on young generation too . Children , if doing something wrong in worship centres is not their mistakes as they are immature but the mistake of their parents.

Parents are their future maker and must do best they can in front of them and in real life also as a child will follow characteristics of their parents only. While taking holy offerings ( prasada ) or blessings from the priests or food used as religious offerings the devotees often show their greed and want more quantity of blessings in form of ambrosia. This all is observed and noted as a record by God.

Not even the mistakes of devotees but the priests also do many mistakes in those religious places. Priest, now a days, are indulged in wrong activities . They show very less attention to the God and devotees and their concentration is on what a devotee offer to God and its quantity and priest show their greed and cleverness in it. Priests try to do brainwash of the devotees and this too is under the supervision of almighty God and provide the prasada/blessings depending on the quantity and quality of the thing or amount or money a person gives to the God . A priest must be an ideal ,good intelligent and calm hearted religious person who should never do any discrimination based on caste, creed, color or gender. A mind full of purity and good thoughts is necessary condition to find God. God never wants amount or quantity or quality of thing and not even the thing , but God only wants the   wholehearted attention and attachment of the devotees to him. He wants nothing but the faith of a devotee and God is ready to give everything good, a devotee wants or wishes to get as God is the creator of this world. God always exists within the heart of everyone . If a pure mind of a noble person with full concentration, when tries to find God,  just by closing eyes is guranteed to get God's visit. 

Moreover, now a days , people are keeping copy of pictures or God's statue at their homes. These pictures or statues are produced in bulk by the painters/artists or idolist/sculptor . 

According to me ,this must not be done . As people produce various copies of God's pictures or statues and they are doing this just for their business. Except religious places, people are keeping the copy of God at their home, office , cars, using pictures of God in bracelets and necklaces . With this the value and purity of worship places are decreasing day by day . People carelessly keep God's pic anywhere and show very less respect to it . Many times , the industry where these sculpture or pictures are printed in bulk , they throw them in bundle or box from here to there and many of the prints tear off and statues are broken without considering them as a piece of worship and just try to gain maximum profits only by any means. But if on the same place , when God's statue is kept in a pure religious place, it will have considerable position and will be given great respect and faith. For example -: If a particular thing is present in large quantity, then people become unaware of it and they can use in whatever way they want and use it carelessly considering that if some quantity is used by a person then it will not affect the rest large quantity and waste it recklessly. On the other hand, if that particular this is present only in small amounts then people pay more attention to it and it become valuable for them and they take care of it very well considering that if people waste it they will not get if back easily again .

That's why for having great value of God's statues/pics , the quantity of copies must be less.


Moreover, in olden times people keep alot of cleanliness and purity in God's home by keeping footwear far away from religious place but now it's not the same rule.

But people have now become very careless and pureless, as they keep their footwear infact anywhere . Today is a time when people their self are making their own rules and keeping footwear wherever they want and even so near the worship place. 


That's the reason why people are unable to find God and a few of calm hearted find God in today's world after alot of true worship.

​After a short ferry ride from Seattle across Puget Sound I can hear in my mind the echoes of "send them back" and "build that wall." I am at the Japanese Exclusion Memorial on Bainbridge Island.
     In March of 1942 american soldiers with rifles and bayonets herded 250 Japanese men, women, and children farmers aboard a boat to begin their trip to concentration camps in Idaho and California. They were allowed only what they could carry and had been given only 6 days notice. The Japanese had no idea of where they were going nor for how long. Many never returned, their land having been stolen by the vultures that had lobbied for their exclusion. It was not unlike today's desecration of The Bears Ears and other preserved lands handed over to big money donors so that job numbers will not reflect their natural state and hinder a re-election.
     However, with the help and support of the people that live here, some Japanese were able to make it back and start over. This memorial is a credit as well to their former neighbors who lived here and loved them.
     How different it is here than what they say is now most of this country. To me there is little wonder that most flights would fly over such bounty hunters and profiteers. To the tune of some lilly white christian hymn, it is also little wonder that what we see is again the forced degradation and removal of those who might have a dime to fall into wanting hands. I suppose many of those dimes will tinkle into the tithe jar as those aforementioned hymns are heralded. Afterwards, consciences and guilt salved, all good patriots will head to their afternoon barbeques.
 
Thank God for this place of remembrance and those who keep it. It is here among the evergreen and Northwest fauna of a Puget Sound inlet that only by recall can the glitz and glamor of a hog mouthed conductor slopping his sucklings be heard.
 
Very wooded, with a record of all those violated, the memorial is quiet.

​Someone stole the tip box at the Starbucks. Now we are being asked to donate to replace those tips. Did the thief need it more than the baristas? I heard about it on Nextdoor.
There is controversy between the board at our homeowner’s association and one of the homeowners. This is not the first incident. Three emails update me. There must be more time to write because of the quarantine.
Outside my window, shimmering in the backlighting from the sun, a tiny spider is moving on its web looking for even smaller prey. It is oblivious to the virus. The virus is oblivious to the spider – it is much, much smaller than the spider’s prey.
 
I hear the echo from the tv in the other room; we are on the same channel.
News about Covid-19.
What causes the delay?
I calculated it is only .02 seconds away for the sound.
Don’t the WiFi and Cable and satellite move at the speed of light? Where are the delays getting into the system, I have time to worry about those issues, thanks to shelter in place?
So many people walk past my window – some I’ve never seen before. I should meet them – but maintain social distance. I’ve never liked shaking hands and despised hugging – I love it now, the new rules.
My hermit inner self is in heaven. This can go on for me.
We sneak out. We plan our outings for maximum joy. We take our sandwiches from Arby’s drive through to the park – it’s our new normal date night. We plan for a trip to buy groceries like it was a world tour.
I look up the numbers on-line. Can I see a flattening of the curve? Not yet, but I know it is hidden somewhere in the data I have access to, or maybe they aren’t releasing all of the numbers, like the Chinese.
There are rumors – urns at Wuhan – great significance, we went to Wuhan.
Malaria meds work! I’ve taken them on trips to dangerous places on holidays and in VN – there were greater dangers there. People die from aquarium cleaner or rubbing alcohol.
I get emails from my doctor, my gym, my local theatre, Panera, Bevmo – think I’ll take them up on the free pick-up on the sidewalk offer, my church, everyone wants to tell me what they are doing and what I must do.
 
The US has overtaken China in number of cases. New Orleans, Chicago and Detroit are trying to surpass New York, I doubt that they can do it. Sports have been cancelled – wonder if I can get some kind of bet on that spider I saw.
 
Results of tests are now available in 15 minutes!  Some of them have accurate results; I almost wish I had some symptoms so I could get one.
It’s named for a beer brand, well not really – sales of Cerveza Corona have fallen precipitously. Last time we were officially out, three weeks ago, I jokingly ordered a Corona from the bar tender, we laughed. He filed for Unemployment on Wednesday.
I’m wasting time, I’ve got to do more.
Motivate, motivate, motivate. Is this a waste of time?
I spend time on-line. It’s comforting, it’s terrifying, my Wi-Fi becomes intermittent; that is really terrifying. 
I’m walking for exercise again. Trying to preserve my feet from the ravages of old age and a previous  injury. 
I have named my walking routes – today I did Via Rancho Parkway,
Yesterday we did Kay-2 – that’s with Blacks Hill, Kay-1 skips Blacks hill.
The fourth route is Long-Steep, I’m saving it for tomorrow.
Round trip to Target 6500 steps! Includes shopping.
I take a shower every other day now . I skipped one day but couldn’t smell myself.
 
Alert! Alert! Loss of sense of smell and taste are symptoms! I can smell other things. False alert.
I gained three pounds one day - my scale is no longer my friend can a handful of chips be to blame?  I have a target, a range of acceptable weight - fat? this isn’t within my acceptable range.
It took three days of starvation to get rid of it – just not fair.
When this is over, and it will be over, I’ll look back on the things I didn’t do.
I look out the window again, I wonder whether the spider will catch his breakfast before he becomes someone else’s meal - a difficult way to move up the food chain.
 
Corona Virus Update – late stage.
Boring.

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

​You won a prize: a trip to London!  Oh my gosh; you entered that contest ages and ages ago, and the award just came through.  How totally great.  Must be claimed how?  Phone is just fine to get information?  But, you say, the call is ‘outsourced’ and you can’t quite understand the speaker’s accent?  Well, figure it out!  This is just sensational news.
 
Details: travel must start by end of this month or prize voided.  Okay.  Get hold of the airlines!  Hm, to get to London requires plane changes from your town just to get to the city that goes across the Atlantic Ocean.  The state borders are restricting incoming traffic.  Geez.  Find another route.  Maybe you can drive across state lines to get to the air-field.  Yeah, the drive may take a couple of days but this trip, all expenses paid, is your ‘dream come true’.
 
What did the plane reservation’s operator say?  London will not accept admission of foreign travelers yet?  Can’t be.  Well, fly to France or ‘whatever’ and drive to London.  Oh.  That means you have to pay airfare.  Didn’t think of that problem.  Can’t this prize be extended to when you can enter England?  Isn’t there a ‘small print’ for this whole thing because of the stupid virus?  Yeah, The virus isn’t stupid, just the people who think nothing can happen specifically to them are stupid.
 
Of course I prefer ‘gone viral’ to mean what it is supposed to mean: everyone everywhere can see what’s been posted online!  That’s the viral I like.  So how’d they come up with the word ‘virus’ to indicate something else?
 
We just have to figure out how you can have your all-expenses paid trip to “London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”  Of course I played that game in the elementary school yard during recess.  Didn’t everybody?  No.  I never thought it had meaning.  Has to do with repairing the structure?  You’re kidding.  A nursery rhyme is, well, a nursery rhyme.  Little children don’t even know what a bridge is!  “Ring around the Rosie” means what?  You definitely are not serious.  The Black Death. The rosy rash showed you had the plague, and the posies smelled over the scent of decaying flesh.  Yuk.  Now you want to ruin “Mary, Mary Quite Contrary” with the person being Henry VIII’s daughter and her brother Edward VI, and she couldn’t reverse ecclesiastical changes!  Stop.  I like the sing-song nursery rhymes and want to pretend each is about nothing.  How can I sing them out loud ever again now that you’ve put these images in my head.
 
All right.  Enter another contest like this, and hope, if you do win it in about five years as it seems this one took almost that long, it’ll be like ‘ring around the rosie’ Black Plague and, back in the 14th century, it took four years of what we now call safe-distancing and it went away.
 
 

​Lois Greene Stone, writer and poet, has been syndicated worldwide. Poetry and personal essays have been included in hard & softcover book anthologies.  Collections of her personal items/ photos/ memorabilia are in major museums including twelve different divisions of The Smithsonian.  The Smithsonian selected her photo to represent all teens from a specific decade.

            I'm grown up.  I really am 'mature', educated, worldly, but hardly sophisticated, which has little to do with getting older anyway.  Well, so you can chuckle at how I can still blurt-out thoughts, I've got to give you a glimpse into a specific childhood event.  Here goes:
            I stood in the dinette facing my older sister.  While she played with the ridges around her ten-cent coin, I insisted she couldn't have TWO of my nickels for just ONE of her dimes;  two is more than one no matter what she said.
            My father attempted to explain that a dime was equal to two nickels;  I didn't believe him.  My smooth-edged circles were larger and had more designs on them.  No one could fool me;  I was six and smart.
            Screaming and calling me stupid, my nine year old sister assured me there was no trick to the transaction.  I stubbornly stated that if they were the same, then I'd keep my two and she could keep her one.
            I knew I could outshout, outstare, outanything anyone.  Stubborn was good.  Grandpa tried to give me a funny coin once...to save.  It said "Union Forever" and he called it a Civil War token.  I told him to give it to my sister 'cause it wasn't real money.  See.  I was smart.
            Oh.  And I remember Grandma trying to test me when she dropped a huge, heavy thing on my dresser.  She called it a silver dollar.  Who was she fooling?  Dollars are made out of paper!
            I learned about money in school.  First 'money' was oxen and cows since everyone needed something to pull a plow, give milk, haul a cart, be skinned for shoes and clothes.  Then the teacher said that animals were too big to carry around so money had to be easy to carry and not spoil.  So, small metal chips got stamped with something to show where they were made;  yeah, art stuff.  Good so far?  Well, a zillion years ago in 1652, in Boston, Massachusetts, pictures of trees were put on our money and a man named John Hull gave his daughter her weight in coins as a wedding gift.  Really!  She got ten thousand Pine Tree shillings, but I couldn't remember, at the time, what a shilling meant so I didn't know if she had been fat or skinny.
            A metal bank from the World's Fair, shaped like a trylon and perisphere, had a coin slot that fit only pennies.  Pennies were nice.  I liked the color.  When this bank filled, and I'd stabbed my hand on the trylon's sharp point hundreds of times, I sorted my cents and tried to have one Lincoln dated year by year.  I hoped no one dropped those old Indian pennies in my bank;  I only wanted Lincoln.  He was a President of the United States.  I learned that in school, also.  Oh, I only kept the shiny Lincoln's if more than one had the same date.
            Bet you didn't think when I was a little kid that I knew names of presidents or how to read coin numbers like 1914, 1915, 1916 and more.  Mommy had told me about mint marks but I couldn't imagine how mint leaves we put in tea could mark my pennies.
            Lincoln pennies spelled out 'one cent' on the back.  That sure was sensible.  My Jefferson nickel had his house on the 'tails' side when I flipped a coin.  How could anyone from another country know that coin was a nickel when it didn't say so in big print!  I was never going to save those.  And Lincoln was in pictures all over school, well, wherever Washington wasn't.
            Grown up.  With poise and intelligent awareness acquired with aging, I attended an exhibit of original photographic masterpieces. In The International Museum of Photography, I stared at real, not prints; some were even signed.  Seeing the original "The Migrant Mother" was stirring.  Famous names like Daugerre, Man Ray, Bruehl, made me search my learnings for each technique that separated them as artists.  In open spots, free from assembled viewers, I moved not following sequenced dates of the display.  A picture of once movie-actress Marlene Dietrich bothered me;  I didn't like her eyebrows or position of her hand.  I decided that the artist, however, intended to do something to cause a viewer to both remember her and his craft.  I walked quietly taking in these treasures with adult fascination.
            When I got to a photograph of Lincoln, I forgot I was in a place of silence, as museums always are, so, quite loud and with a girlish giggle, I exclaimed "He looks just like the penny."
 
May 1995 Rochester Shorts
 

​I have been studying my mother's life after the death of my father in 2003. She has been strong woman, brave and a fighter. She doesn't give up easily when it comes to her goals. She doesn't complain no matter what's at stake. Sometimes,  I wonder how she manages to put on a smiling face every day, how she manages to put on a bold face everyday no matter the circumstances that come on her way; how she has been able to train us to this moment. I wonder how she reacts whenever she misses my father. She must have missed her husband of many years many times  but who would she complain to? Her children? God? I don't really know how she overcomes all these things but I believe that widows are strong people and in whatever way we think we can help them, we should. We should try to sustain those smiles on their faces and give them hope of tomorrow. They say, a husband is a cover for her wife and when a woman loses her husband, she loses part of herself and that is true. Mother has been my number one fans and a role model.

Some years back, I stormed into her room to see mother watching the photographs of father in between smile and tears — her fears increased the tempo of her heart beats and the atmosphere was tensed. She was not aware that someone was inside the room. I stood there in tears, too. I tried not to break into her thought as I made for the door and left. I’d once been told that if a woman wanted something she did not have, no matter how elusive that thing was, if her feet do not restrain her from chasing it, she would eventually grab it but not when the love of their life is gone to return no more.


Some of these women maybe in their thirties or late forties but refused to remarry after the death of their husbands. Some of them did this not because they were strong enough to be alone but because they were afraid that the new husband might not accept their children. He might not like or love them just like her or see them as his own children. Even if he does, his family members may not want them and so, they decide to remain single for their children's interest and some, may decide not to remarry because of the love they have for their children. They have to stay and train up their children. Give them a better life and future as they desire. Some may not because of the love for their dead husbands. Widows are strong people so as widowers who never remarried.

However,  these women should not been seen as beggars when they come to you for help. Help them in the little way you can. Put a smile on their faces. They are not beggars but victims of circumstances. Who fate seized their entities in way to deny them of love and affection. Show them some love if you come across them. Give them gifts no matter how little it is, they will appreciate it. I'm always happy to see churches set aside one Sunday to celebrate widows and widowers. They present gifts to them and pray for them. This, in some ways, lifts their spirits and help them  realise that some people still care about them and their well being.


If your mother is a widow or your father is a widower, please, don't provoke him or her. Don't make her think about your father and dont make him think about your mother. Help them in a little way you can. It does not matter how small it may look but just help. There is this woman in my street, her husband was a soldier. She was living happily with him and their three children; one boy, two girls, until Boko Haram came. Until bombing started. Until Nigeria started taking much interest in Boko Haram than her Army. Her husband was among the people sent to Sambisa. He went and never returned. Nobody knows anything about him again till now. We don't know if he was killed or wounded. Nobody knows if he's  alive or not but we have all concluded that he's dead because he has been missing for long.

Now, the woman is a widow catering for three wonderful children, a job she once shared with her husband. Some weeks ago before she packed out of our street, some people came and offered her presents. They prayed for her and promised to come back again. Later, a friend of her told me how happy she was when those people presented those gifts to her. According to her, she had nothing to cook for her children in the past Christmas before those people came. She had planned that she would take them to their father's sister place for the Christmas since nothing was at home. But miracle happened and those people brought those items for her. Imagine how happy she would have been after they left.

On 23 of December, 2019, we planned on visiting few of them I know around my house to give them some gifts but we failed because the money we were expecting didn't arrive. And some of our plans failed us, too. They failed us in many ways which I may not likely go into details for now. But my take here is that, always try as much as possible to leave on the faces of these widows and widowers because they need it from you. Help them in any way you can.

​While growing up in Aba, there were many single mothers and fathers I knew in my street. And these single mothers and fathers have children. Some have six children and some seven and others, eight before the death of their spouse. You'll believe that no matter how good a mother is, it is not good for only her to train a child. And no matter how lovely a father is, it is not also good for only him to train his children. Some fathers are usually strict and hot while dealing with their children while some mothers are some how soft while training their children. However, if the two comes together to train up a child, the child will end up becoming normal to some extent. When a father becomes too hot or strict with his dealings, the softness of a mother turns his anger cold or some how soft to the children. Perhaps, that is how nature has made it to be; two hands in training and upbringing of a child. But in a situation where we have only a father or a mother,  it becomes too hard for a single hand to train and care for a child.


In my church then, we have a special service every month for the widows and widowers in the church. This service usually take place every last Sunday of the month and my Pastor who was then working with one oil company in Port Harcourt had an account he set aside for these widows and widowers and he gave willing members who God had touched in their heart to donate as well for this course. In fact, the gate was widely opened in my church that some widows and widowers that were not the church members are allowed to come to that service. They were treated equally like the church members. And respected, too. So, a day before the service usually on Saturday, the pastor appoints some members of the church who go to the market to buy food stuffs ranging from bags of rice, Tin tomatoes, Maggi, fresh Fish, Vegetables and  lots of other things. During this service, all the widows and widowers are called out on the church altar and prayed for. They are prayed for by the pastor and the church members along side their children. Later, the gifts are presented to them all. I was always fascinated by the smiles on their faces. By the expression on their faces and how they would walk majestically back to their seats. The pastor would always tell them to walk majestically to their seats and never allow anybody intimidate them because they were widows and widowers. They should not be ashamed of who they are and never get tired of disturbing God who would take care of them. 


I grew up loving these people. I grew up having a soft spot for them because of the courage and strength they exhibit. Because these people, are still happy after their misfortunes, they found reasons to moved on with their lives after the death of their spouses. They were not after how the storm of life is throwing them here and there, the tribulations of life may come in different forms but they were not moved by it. That has always been my happiness. No matter how ugly your mother is ( if there is anything like that), she is still your mother and there's nothing to equal her in anyway, same as your father. Aside from being strong people, these widows and widowers have something in common too, they are courageous and brave. You hardly see their tears in public. They have these characteristics of holding on for a very long time. They live a prayerful life. A life full of hope and faith. A grieving widow’s pain  is unique and volatile. What encourages and uplifts one woman may be painfully unhelpful to another. Grief is like a virus that waxes and wanes with intensity. 


The Quest for survival has made many of us  forget the smallest of all things which is very relevant to our neighbors. We have forgotten the significance abound in longing to help those who are in need. Perhaps the toiling and sweat of  our daily activities have made us lose concentration of those who seek for our attention in our communities. I have come to understand that everything is not all about money. Sometimes when we don't have money, we should encourage and care for some people, it helps. The magnitude of what we have forgotten are those things hurting us some times and more and more are going right into the drain because some of us no longer cares. Maybe, you should in your spare time, think about these people logically. These people that some well fed neighbors have categorized as baggers because they seek for water to quench their taste. They are widows not baggers. They are not dogs you stone food at. Bedbug once told it children that they should endure that everybody would have a large lips. Nobody asks for death, it comes and takes when he needs a soul.


Meanwhile, don't neglects these people. Don't allow them tear up when they remember their lost ones. Help them in whichever way you can. A grieving widow who lives alone may go several days without hearing another human voice, especially months after the initial funeral of her husband. Emails, text messages  and letters are good; however, phone calls and visits may be better if you can create that time. While this may not seem like the most efficient use of your time, efficiency and effectiveness are sometimes mutually exclusive. Emotional mine fields such as these may require intimate knowledge of the bereaved and how they are taking the Lost of their lives ones. A close friend, relatives or neighbors might be better suited to visit a widow than some Pastors. Don’t confuse compassion for a church acquaintance with a call to take personal action. If you don’t know the widow well, allow one of her close friends to direct your efforts. It will ease out so many things when someone very close visits her.

​Martha Franks spent the academic years 2012-14 in Beijing, China, developing and teaching a liberal arts curriculum at the Affiliated High School of Peking University (BDFZ). She brought to that task her experience as a part-time faculty member at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At St. John's, and then at BDFZ, she taught the classics of Western literature through discussion classes. Both the books and the style of teaching were new experiences for her Chinese students.

["What is the best life?" I asked, the classic philosophical inquiry. After a silence, one of the students--I could not see who--whispered, "The best life is to be rich."]

Ms. Franks has had a separate career as a lawyer. She began that career with a few years at a large Wall Street law firm, after which she moved to New Mexico, where she has practiced water law for thirty years. She offered a class in American Law to Chinese students.

["It's not true that everyone is created equal like this Declaration says!" objected some students strongly. Others were just as sure that the truth of this claim was self-evident.]

Ms. Franks also has a degree in theology from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. In addition to her book about teaching in China, she has a number of publications in both water law and theology. She is a painter, having attended the Marchutz School of Art in Aix-en-Provence, France.

Lots of different experiments in what is the best life.
 
Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China
 
by Martha Clark Franks
246 pages
Paperback $18.00
Also available as an ebook
Nonfiction, Memoir, Cultural Studies
Publication Date: May 30, 2019
Respondeo Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-0999305928
Contact: [email protected]
More info at: https://www.respondeobooks.com/new-products/books-without-borders


You teach at a very unique institution here in the United States. What is the educational philosophy of St. John's College?
 
St. John’s College believes that we learn by talking together about the great creative works of the human spirit.
 
The college is committed to the idea that classic original texts offer foundational insights about ourselves and our society and that students should form their own opinions of these works rather than being told by textbooks and lectures what to think about them.
 
St. John’s has only one program of teaching; that is, discussions about great works. Under this broad program, undergraduates concentrate on the great books of the Western world. There are two graduate programs at the College.  One, the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, looks at the same works as the undergraduate program, while another, the Eastern Classics program, takes the St. John’s approach toward classics of China, India and Japan. 
   
The St. John’s College program grew from radical criticism of the structure of liberal arts education in the early 20th century.  The concerns that the College sought to address then are perhaps even more relevant today, when liberal arts education is challenged by exclusively STEM-based or narrow vocational education. 
 
Could you describe classroom etiquette and culture in China vs the USA (what you've experienced and where you teach)? 
 
Chinese students were not used to talking in class.  They had a hard time believing that I genuinely wanted to hear what they had to say. Although they did not complain, they also doubted that expressing their ideas would lead to learning. It took some time before they entered into conversation without being self-conscious. Once that began to happen, however, they were quick to feel the curiosity and joy of their minds at work, taking them places that they could only go on their own.  It was lovely to see. 
 
American students sometimes come at conversation from the opposite direction.  They are familiar with raising their voices but must get used to the skill of listening to responses and building on them.  After a while together, though, I did not see a difference in the conversations that developed in China and America.
 
What sorts of ancient Western concepts did the Chinese students relate to, and which were mystifying to them? 
 
The students related to all matters of our common humanity, which was wonderful for all of us. It was great to feel that we were people together, trying to figure out how to live in this bewildering world.  We could converse and understand each other. 
 
Some of our cultural prejudices were different.  In America, there is a saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  In the East, there is a saying “it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered.”  So the students were more reluctant to talk than their American counterparts (although some of this was due to second language issues), and disliked disagreement more. 
 
Religion was mystifying to them.  They had no experience of it and did not know how to understand what it was in the West.  When we read the Iliad they wondered if the gods of Greece were what religion still looked like.  When we tried to read some of the texts of early Christianity they were simply bewildered and did not talk at all. 
 
What would you say you learned from Chinese culture and history? What do they emphasize that the Western world could learn from? 
 
As I gave my Chinese students Western classics to read, I also read Eastern classics as a way of empathizing from the other direction with their exploration of an entirely different culture. The picture in China is complicated, in that Marxism is a Western idea, and the desire to catch up with the West technologically is a powerful force in China, which means that Western ideas can generate a mix of desire and resentment.  Many of my students did not know very much about their own cultural past, although they were proud of China’s five thousand years of civilization.
 
The chief thing that I learned, or at least meditated on a great deal, was this picture of Chinese identity arising somehow from those five thousand years, even though governments and cultural sensibilities evolved and changed enormously in that length of time. It is a vision of identity that has less to do with particular ideals and ideologies, and more to do with a sense of living within deep time.
 
I also came to appreciate and admire the combination of delicacy and strength in Chinese art and poetry.  Classic Eastern texts like The Dream of the Red Chamber are gentle and sensitive to a degree that a person can feel lost in fragile beauty.  The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, by contrast, is a warrior tale of relentless war, although it too contains moments of gentleness and sensitivity. I think the West, and perhaps all of us humans, could spend more time seeing beauty.
 
What makes a literary work a classic? Why should we still teach the traditional canon? What about efforts to update or diversify it? 
 
A classic work is one that can be read again and again and never be exhausted of meaning and engagement. As member of the faculty of St. John’s College, a school that reads great books as the center of the curriculum, I have read Homer and Plato and Augustine and Shakespeare many times. Every time I read these books I find more in them that speaks to my present life as well as to my mind and heart. 
 
We need to teach these books because of that experience of how inexhaustible they are.  As I watch college students reading them, I am glad—sometimes thinking of my Chinese students—to offer them the proud, compelling gifts of their human heritage.
 
Greatness is certainly not confined to any particular culture, gender or any such false separations of the human experience.  Sadly, the practical reality of the dominating tendency of our species is that women and many cultures were not allowed to produce the works of profound beauty that we needed from them. When such works are found, either in the past or the present, they become part of the canon.  
 
What would a 'global literary canon' look like? Who would decide what's in the global canon, and how would they make those decisions? 
 
The experiment of St. John’s College’s great books program, which has been going on for almost eighty years, has shown that an education based on conversations around great works of the human spirit can open and free minds, as well as being amazingly fun. It’s a harder question to try to identify exactly which books belong on a great books list. A few are always at the center of a Western canon—Homer, Euclid, Plato, Shakespeare—but most of the rest have their advocates and opponents. Conversation about that list is always going on and the list changes with different sensibilities, especially as one comes to more recent works.
 
It has been wonderful to be part of the evolution of the St. John’s list to include the voices of women and minorities speaking to the human experience from points of view that were for too long too often missing from the conversation.  When a global list comes about the conversation will grow again. The dream is to include all points of view so that humanity is fully heard from.
 
Do you feel that people, in China or in the West, are still influenced by our foundational books? Even people who have not read the traditional classics?
 
Yes to both questions.  Even when people are not aware of how these deep structures to their culture influence them, the influence is there. Part of the value of reading the canon is to notice those influences working. A reader discovers in their original form as new ideas things that the reader realizes s/he had previously unthinkingly accepted as if obviously true. From that changed relationship with these ideas, the ideas can be reassessed.  The reader may continue to think them true, but now they feel true in a fuller, surer way. 
 
In my class on American law in China, for example, we discussed the line in the American Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal. . . .”  The conversation ranged fearlessly over questions of gender, creation and the definition of equality.  By the end of that conversation there was both agreement and disagreement, but both were articulated and could be considered in the open.  The conversation will undoubtedly continue for all of us.  
 
What surprised and impressed you the most about China’s foundational works? 
 
I believe that Chinese society has been influenced by its foundational books.  Students are taught to read Tang era poetry and are aware, but often not really familiar with, classical authors such as Kongzi (Confucius) and Mengzi (Mencius).  However, China’s relation to its own literary tradition is an especially interesting case because of the overlay of the Western ideology of Marxism. Nevertheless, as China grows cautiously away from a Marxist economy, it has been developing what it calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” 
 
Those “Chinese characteristics” are not defined but they must be related to China’s pride in its five-thousand-year history of civilization, a pride that is deeper than any political dogma. Confucius has been increasingly re-established and celebrated in China, with his emphasis on ritual and humaneness. No doubt there will be hesitations along the way, but I believe that China will find its way into a modern, uniquely Chinese re-assertion of Confucian humaneness that will be in conversation with the Western notion of the humanities.
 
It’s hard to say which culture is more influenced by its foundational works—that would be a lifetime’s study.  If there is truth in the sketch I have offered here, that the canon of Western culture has developed into a focus on freedom, whereas Eastern culture has more often emphasized virtue and order, then both are pointing to fundamental human impulses that will continue to converse in all and each of us. 
 
What surprised me most in studying Eastern classics was recognizing this struggle that I had seen in the Western canon too between the desire and need for freedom, especially in the mind, and the necessity of discipline. It’s a human problem and we can help each other with it. 
 
That’s interesting, the perennial conflict between liberty and social order. How can conversations about classic works help us understand the roots of these kinds of present-day social issues?
 
Attitudes and ideas fill the air we breathe, whether we are aware of them or not. For example, in America it seems obvious that the goal of society is to promote freedom.  That attitude didn’t come from nowhere.  It was proposed and articulated by particular people—John Stuart Mill, for one – who were contributing new ideas to a conversation about human purposes.  For many centuries the participants in that conversation had seemed to agree that the goal of society was not to promote freedom but to uphold virtue and order even at the cost of freedom. We understand our present debates between liberals and conservatives if we have in mind the earlier conversation that shaped our shared traditions.  Only then can we see what has been at stake in that clash of ideas and form a personal opinion about why we have chosen as we have.
 
In cultures with different traditional conversations the focus on freedom that Americans take for granted looks different and can seem dangerous, even though the impulse toward freedom is something that is present in every human community and is not strange to Eastern thinkers. That situation is another reason why working to create a single, global conversation is so important. Attitudes and ideas that have been unconsciously absorbed and never examined can result in misunderstandings and distrust, whereas listening to each other’s conversations can show how the same human problems are always present. We must work to understand our own foundational ideas better, which will make it possible to feel the human reasonableness of another culture’s foundational ideas. 
 
Would you recommend teaching abroad in China? Do you feel that you grew through the experience? 
 
Yes again. Physical distance and the change of culture has a similar effect of allowing a person to look carefully at themselves and notice the things that they might previously have accepted unthinkingly.  Reading great books is like traveling to the past, while traveling more literally provides a different kind of dislocation. Both are valuable to understanding who you are. 
 
Could you teach this way in the US? How much freedom do teachers have in other countries to create and influence curriculum? 
 
I was very lucky to have gone to China exactly when I did, when there was a flowering of experiments in progressive education. We had a good deal of freedom to create a curriculum. Some of those experiments are still going on, but China, as I describe in my book, is conflicted about the value of a liberal arts education.  For decades, China concentrated on a STEM education, that is, one focused on math and science.  Recently that has changed, as some have argued that the liberal arts should be taught as a source of creativity for China.  Others, however, are against that change, concerned that the liberal arts are foolish luxuries and can also be subversive politically. 
 
The same conflict is going on in the United States, as many liberal arts colleges are struggling. It would be a shame if liberal arts declines in the United States just as it arises in China. For me, the liberal arts display the full range of what it is to be human.  We all need that.
 
If you could do the semester in China over again, what would you change? 
 
Not much.  I might have a few different choices of exactly what books to read.  The only real difference is that, if I were to return, I would be able to show more confidence that an approach that I loved myself was something that Chinese students would also love. Conversation is a human thing. It’s how many of us learn best. It was wonderful to be part of a conversation that, while sometimes surprising because of the different backgrounds of the participants, was like all serious conversation in the delight of exchanging ideas. 
 

​We know the story all too well.  It has been repeated so often it has become a leitmotif of human history: a conquering army overcomes a rival, and in the aftermath a once-thriving civilization is reduced to rubble and ashes.  A defeated population is slaughtered or enslaved, its cities are looted, its temples and monuments razed.  A page is torn from the human story, to be pieced back together by those who follow.
            When the Macedonian Alexander the Great seized Persepolis in 330 B.C., the capital of the Persian Empire was torched and looted in a matter of days.  Historians claim that it took a team of over 3,000 camels, mules, and other pack animals to carry off all the loot, which included 2,500 tons of gold and silver.  They also agree that it was largely in retaliation for the Persians’ burning of the Athens 150 years earlier, so a callous scorekeeper might write off the mayhem as a tit-for-tat.
            After the Ottoman sultan Mehmet I conquered the Byzantine capital of Constantinople in 1453, his troops were allowed to wreak havoc on the city for three days, in keeping with the custom of the time.  Many of the inhabitants were butchered, half of the houses were destroyed, and its many churches stripped of their valuables.  The Hagia Sophia became a mosque and the city itself was given a new name—Istanbul, or “full of Islam.”
            Less than a century later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Aztec ruler Montezuma confronted the advancing armies of Hernando Cortez.  Aided by the Tlaxcalans, one of Montezuma’s rivals, Cortes laid waste to one Aztec city after another until he had Montezuma cornered in the city of Tenochititlan.   After an eight-month siege, Tenochititlan surrendered.  Cortes’ forces ravaged the city and swapped the statues of the Aztec gods for Christian icons.
            But it didn’t always have to be that way, and it always wasn’t.  For over 200 years Sicily prospered under Arab rule.  It was governed with a spirit of tolerance and acceptance of the island’s many faiths and ethnicities—Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Saracens from North Africa, Italian tribesmen.  It became a fantastically wealthy trading center, known for its spirit of decadence and indulgence.  But the Arabs had also turned the island’s patchwork of villages into well-ordered towns and cities, introduced an irrigation system that boosted agricultural production, and established local markets to stimulate intra-island trade.  Then the French Normans, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, landed on Siciliy’s western coast in 1061, led by Robert Guiscard and Roger Bosso, Robert’s younger brother. 
            From a conqueror’s point of view, Robert and Roger couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time.  Despite its prosperity, discontent on the island was rife, with regional warlords itching for a rebellion against the rulers in Palermo.  The brothers exploited the fray, making deals with leaders of the local fiefs that involved swapping control of land for military support.  Bit by bit, Robert and Roger gained control of more and more of Sicily, so that by 1072 they were able to seize the capital Palermo itself.
            Here is where the story takes an unexpected turn.  In the wake of the conquest, none of Sicily’s mosques were burned.  Christian icons never replaced the Islamic symbols of daily life.  The Arabic language was not banned.  None of the non-Christian population fell to Crusaders’ swords.  Instead, the brothers recognized the achievements of the longtime Arab rulers and advanced knowledge they had brought to the island and chose to build on them.  Eventually both Robert and Roger passed into history.  Roger’s son Simon enjoyed a brief reign as he island’s ruler, but control of Sicily was then handed to Roger II, and under his reign the island reached a level of wealth, power, and influence it hasn’t seen in the near thousand years since.
            Roger II has often been described as a “product of the Mediterranean.”  Both his character and consciousness were shaped by the many influences of the region.  He was born in multicultural, multi-religious Calabria in 1095, where mosques stood casually alongside churches.  His early teachers were Greek and Muslim scholars.  He was fond of discussing medicine, philosophy, and mathematics, learned Arabic early in life and spoke it fluently.  In a nod to Sicily’s Arab legacy his regal cloak carried the date of his regency in the Islamic year—528.
Once Roger II became the ruler of Sicily he choose not to upset its delicate applecart but continue driving it forward.  Almost a thousand years before the term “multicultural” had become the buzzword of the modern era, Roger II put it into practice in the upper echelon of his government.  Muslim calligraphers recorded state business in beautifully cursive Arabic.  Local bishops represented the churches of England, France, and Italy.  French became the official language of the court, but royal decrees were written in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, depending on the community most affected by their content.  His commander-in-chief was George of Antioch, a Syrian Christian whose first language was Greek.  Under George the Sicilian fleet came to rule the Mediterranean.  Other notables included the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, and Nilus Doxopatrius, an historian of Greek ancestry.  Rather than impose a common code of justice, under Roger the people faced tribunals that applied the laws of their various religions.  His approach to governance had a continent-wide payoff: many of the textbooks used in the fledgling universities that had begun to appear all over Europe were translations of scholarly documents that had been compiled in Sicily. 
The cultural mélange of the island was evident in every aspect of daily life.  Coins were inscribed with the Islamic year.  Arabic-speaking Christians often sported Muslim attire.  The blend of talents and ideas brought the island a level of development that rivaled nearby Andalusia.  Before the arrival of the Normans, the Arabs had brought cotton, sugar cane, citrus fruits, and dates to Sicily, and Roger refined these innovations, developing profitable industries in the production and export of textiles, sugar, wheat, cheese, and, following successful raids on the Byzantine Empire, the fabric that had become the craze of the Mediterranean—silk. 
It can’t be denied that geography helped.  Sicily’s location in the center of the Mediterranean made it a convenient crossroads for the passage of goods but also ideas, and Roger turned away no one who could contribute to the island’s prosperity.  On his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca, the Spanish-Muslim geographer Ibn Jubeir wrote:
[Palermo] is endowed with two gifts, splendor and wealth.  It contains all the real and imagined beauty that anyone  could wish.  Splendor and grace adorn the piazzas and the countryside.  The streets and the highways are wide, and the eye is dazzled by the beauty . . . It is a city full of marvels, with buildings similar to those of Cordoba . . . A permanent stream of water from springs runs through the city.  There are so many mosques they are impossible to count.  Most of them also serve as schools.  The eye is dazzled by all this brilliance.
The multicultural character of the island is most clearly represented in a funerary stone for a woman known only as Anna, mother of a priest who went by the name of Grisandus.  The inscription is written in Arabic, Latin, Greek, and a fusion of Hebrew and Arabic called Judeo-Arabic, which was designed for Sicily’s Sephardic Jews.  The date of death is also given special treatment.  It was recorded in agreement with the Byzantine, Gregorian, and Islamic calendars.
By the time of his death, Roger had succeeded in uniting all the Norman conquests in Italy into one kingdom with a strong centralized government.  Regrettably, like so many good things in life, it was not to last.  By 1170, anti-Muslim pogroms began to drive many of the Muslims off the island.  Around the year 1200 a “Latinization” effort began to flatten the island’s multicultural character.  A wave of conversions made Catholicism the dominant religion.  By the middle of the century Islam had all but disappeared from Sicily.
            That could have been the end of the story of Sicily, or at least the island’s cultural kaleidoscope, but it wasn’t—because the Normans were builders, and Roger II, particularly, took a fancy to the aesthetic sensibilities of not only the Arab rulers he supplanted but his archrivals, the Byzantines centered in Constantinople.  Almost a thousand years later, the edifices the Normans left behind stand as monuments to the principle of fusion.  Today it is a buzzword associated with faddish cuisine, but in historical terms it means recognizing rather than erasing the aesthetic values of those who had gone before.  In architectural terms it sets Sicily apart from the rest of Italy, and even defines the term Sicilian.
In 1131, a year after Roger II was crowned the island’s king, his man of the sea George of Antioch threw up the Ponte dell’Ammiraglio, or Admiral’s Bridge, over the Oreto River, east of Palermo’s center.  Legend has it that Archangel Michael appeared before Roger at the site and assisted in his conquest of the island.  Whatever its origins, the bridge’s austere lines mark it as Norman, though the same geometric simplicity offers a nod to Arab design. 
A few years later Roger reclaimed the San Giovanni degli Eremiti, or St. John of the Hermits, a sixth-century church that later had been turned into a mosque.  With magnanimity in victory, Roger paid due diligence to the island’s former rulers, rebuilding the entire complex with echoes of Arab design, particularly in the exterior garden, a common feature of Islamic architecture.
Of course there is more.  In the center of Palermo, the Church of San Cataldo, on the Piazza Bellini, rose from the foundation of a former church—or mosque, depending on the time period—but both Arab and Byzantine influence is clear.  The overall structure is plain to the point of stark (Norman), but geometric designs (Arab) and red domes (Byzantine) defer to influences from the east and add a touch of panache.
Looming over St. John of the Hermits is the massive Palazzo dei Normanni, which served as the Norman kings’ command center after they ousted the Arab rulers.  It was built on the site of Arab fortress, but the many gardens that connect the mishmash of buildings and arcades were the creation of Arab horticulturists, to preserve a central feature that came in handy in the searing Sicilian summers.  Just down the street, the hulking Cathedral of Palermo displays no Islamic influence, and naturally so, but Roger II recruited artisans from Constantinople to create the decorative mosaics splashed across its interior.
It is a bit ironic that one of the most prominent examples of Arab-Norman fusion lies far outside Palermo.  It is the cathedral of Monreale, perched at the high point in the town of the same name, and the only reason to visit.  But the trip is an essential part of the journey, for the bus from the Piazza Palatina traverses the green and undulating Sicilian countryside as tinier villages pass and the road rises toward the town.  The final stop avoids the small plaza in the front of the church.  It is on Monreale’s main street, a few hundred meters from the massive stone hulk, which is a good thing.  It means a final trek of several hundred meters to cover the rest of the distance, and satisfaction delayed is satisfaction better satisfied.
Monreale would not be Monreale, and Monreale would not be Sicilian if it weren’t for a legend about the cathedral’s origins.  This one claims that William II was out hunting near Monreale when he happened to doze off under a tree.  As he dreamt the Virgin Mary instructed him to build a church on the site.  Awakened, William found enough gold beneath the tree to fund Monreale’s construction.
History is every myth’s spoiler, and Monreale would also not be Sicilian were it not for a more factual account.  In that telling, when the Arabs seized the island in 831 the bishop of Palermo was driven from the city.  Choosing to stay close to home, he found shelter in a tiny village that offered a commanding view of his former town.  There he built a small church to keep the flame of the Christian faith burning, and it became the foundation of the cathedral once the Normans returned and returned Sicily to Christian rule.
Like so much Norman architecture, Monreale’s exterior is stark and severe, as if hiding the many layers of beauty within.  There, Arab-inspired geometric patterns swirl across the marble floor, the entire plan a combination of Eastern and Western designs. Looming above are biblical stories recreated in mosaics that were the work of Venetian (read, Byzantine) craftsmen.  The disorientation continues in the adjoining cloisters.  The courtyard is lined with 108 pairs of columns, decorated in mosaic patterns.  Like snowflakes, no two are the same, and each is crowned with a capital in classical floral design.  Visitors wander around the cathedral in hushed, or awed, or simply confused, silence.  Is this East or West?  A European church or a Damascene mansion?  Neither, and both.  Instead of sending a Christian or Islamic message, what the cathedral stands for is clear—that true beauty is not the sole product of any people or part of the world but the mingling of many.  Each had a hand in the final creation, and each has earned a share of its effect. 
By the time William I and William II, the heirs of Roger II, completed the Al Zisa Palace, the Normans had been thoroughly bitten by the Arab bug.  Al Zisa—meaning the “wonderful” or “splendid”—was intended to serve as a hunting retreat for the Williams whenever they heard the call of the Sicilian countryside.  Today the site is almost due south of Palermo central and well within the boundary of the city proper, so any aura of idyllic bliss is long gone.  Traffic circles around the large park spread out in the front of the palace.  A long rectangular pool, lined with seasonal fountains, serves as a reminder of the Arab origin of the entire complex.
To step beyond the walls surrounding the palace is to leave behind the chaotic traffic of modern Palermo, the conservative Catholicism of the rest of Italy, and even the multicultural character of medieval Palermo.  The Al Zisa is wholly, thoroughly, and unequivocally Eastern.  Doorways topped with pointed arches divide room from room.  Decorative wall niches house oil lamps and ornamental vases.  The walls are doubly thick to guard against the searing heat of summer and damp chill of the Sicilian winter.  Many of the ceilings are decorated with murqanas—a feature of many Islamic buildings in which a ceiling is divided into carved geometric patterns that create a honeycomb effect.
But for any medieval Sicilian the most valuable feature of Al Zisa would have been its air-conditioning system.  To beat the summer heat, Al Zisa was designed to face northeast, to allow the sea breezes to pass across a large pool laid out before the palace’s reception hall.  There a network of ducts and channels carried the fresher, cooler air to the upper levels.  A good night sleep in a Sicilian summer became, quite literally, a delight of kings.
Arab, Greek, and Roman, Norman and Byzantine—Sicily dances over and defies categorization.  The celebration of the mélange is arguably the Capella Palatina, the creation of Roger II as an addition to his Norman Palace.  Tucked away on the second floor, visitors find their way to the entrance by keeping an eye out for discreetly placed directional signs.  But once there, the chapel is presented as quintessentially Norman.  The arches and doors echo North Africa.  Inside, Italian artisans designed the floor, though the mosaics that fill the walls are classic Byzantine.  Higher up, the wooden ceiling is carved in murqanas surrounded with eight-pointed stars, another nod to Arab influence, while the inscriptions are written in Arabic, Greek and Latin.  But lest anyone forget this is a Christian chapel, a massive mosaic of Jesus Christ, the Pantokrator, fills the dome.         
Back in the fifth century B.C., a Sicilian cook who went by the name of Mithecus traveled to Greece, and when he returned he wrote what is believed to be the world’s first cookbook.  Little did he know that in the centuries to come the island he left would become a culinary crossroads, where all the refined tastes of the Mediterranean would have a hand in creating one of the world’s most complex cuisines.  On the western end of the island the immigrant Greeks would fancy dishes packed with pistachios, olives, and broad beans to complement the tried and true staples of fish and vegetables.  Around Tripani, to the west, the North African Berbers favored recipes founded on couscous.  After the opening of the New World the Spanish would add corn, sweet peppers, and tomatoes to the ever expanding stock of ingredients to be found in Sicilian cooking. 
During their two centuries of rule, the Arabs played the role of head chef in the development of Sicilian cuisine, adding citrus fruits such as lemons, limes, and blood oranges, the durum wheat that became the prime ingredient in pasta, and almonds for marzipan desserts (credited to the nuns at the Convent of Eloise).  And let us not forget sugar cane and vanilla, without which we wouldn’t have confetti—nutty, chewy almond clusters—fennel and pine nuts, raisins, dates, and chickpeas, artichokes and sesame seeds, cinnamon, saffron, and nutmeg.  All were all ferried to Sicily by the Saracens of North Africa.
            Once the appetite for architecture is satisfied, there is no better way to savor the multicultural flavor of Sicily than to dip into Sicilian cuisine.
Thin-crust pizza?  Sicily’s crust is thick and often topped with spinach, anchovies, artichokes, and smoked scamorza.
Risotto alla Milanese (arborio rice seasoned with saffron and grated parmesan)?
 
A tough find beyond the Lombardy region.
 
Vegetable lasagna?
            “No, no lasagna.  Lasagna is found mainly from the north,” a waiter patiently informed me one evening, and by “north” he meant the rest of Italy.
            So what is Sicilian cuisine?  The best way to find out was to trek to Palermo’s Kalsa district, like the Vucciria, Ballaro, and Capo, a onetime Arab market where the pencil-thin main street is lined with stalls by day and restaurant terraces at night.  From early morning till afternoon the town folk pick through the freshest of fresh vegetables and fruits, stacks of cheeses (smoky pravola, saffron-flavored piacenteria, conestrata), spice bins filled with fennel and oregano, garlic and sea salt, basil, thyme, and red pepper, and piles of pasta in shapes and textures too many to count.
Then night falls, and the Kalsa—like the Vucciria, Ballaro, and Capo—becomes one of Palermo’s premier dining halls.  The stall owners packed up, the restaurateurs take over.  Catches of the day are spread on beds of ice in glass cases.  All glisten under the glow of flickering fluorescent lights—seabass and salmon, filets of tuna, perhaps cod, halibut, and shrimp, the odd swordfish, seabream, and squid, and on a lucky day a few squiggles of octopus.  Red-and-white-checked tablecloths are spread over wobbly, wooden tables, shielded by sun-faded awnings.  Soon the tablecloths are stained with olive oil and sprinkled with breadcrumbs, courtesy of the parade of guests.  Palermo’s markets cater to the culinary connoisseur, not the impressionable.
            No Sicilian meal would begin without an antipasto, so on the way I pop into a corner kiosk for an arancini, a kneaded ball of creamy risotto, breaded and deep-fried, and laced with tomatoes, vegetables, and diced meat.  Deeper in the Kalsa, the tables have begun to fill and the punters have hit the streets waving menus, but for attention they can’t compete with the aromas that waft from the kitchens.  If smells were sounds the Kalsa would be a cacophony.  There is the strong and the soothing, the playful and the piquant, the sharp and the sweet, but here in the Kalsa all intertwine like the architectural mélange of the Capella Palatina.
            At nine o’clock, dinner in the Kalsa becomes a game of musical chairs, with too few tables for too many diners.  I grab one of the last, and my dinner begins with maccu, a thick soup chuck full of fava beans, onions, and tomatoes that is said to date from Roman times.  For a hint of North African I add a dash of fennel and a drizzle of olive oil.  A crucial decision looms: for the next course, pasta con le sarde (spaghetti tossed with sardines, raisins, pine nuts, and saffron) or pasta alla Norma, from Catania (penne mixed with tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, basil, and a sprinkle of salted ricotta).  It is a tossup.  I toss a coin.  The winner: pasta alla Norma.  It is washed down with a glass of Catarratto bianco (okay, two).  Next comes pesce spada alla ghiotta (swordfish cooked with tomatoes, olives, and capers), and to finish, a slice of cassata Siciliana—sponge cake layered with ricotta and slathered with pistachio marzipan.  But this is a Sicilian dinner, so I’m not truly finished until the finishing touch arrives: a splash of Vecchio Romana, the local brandy, smooth with a hint of fruit but not so sweet as to challenge the sponge cake.
            It is late, and the waiters have begun to sweep the crumbs off the tables.  Another moment of choice: I ask myself—which better represents the full flavor of multicultural Sicily, the church tours or my Kalsa feast?  Another tossup.  I toss another coin.  It spins, twirls, gyrates in the air, then lands on its side, wobbles a moment, tips left, then right, but stays upright.
 

​Tennis anyone?  Horseback riding?  A round of golf?  Try your luck at the shooting range, or out on the hunting grounds?  Aim clear of the private zoo, with its collection of peacocks, yaks, ostriches, deer, antelope, pheasants, and wild boar.  For the motoring minded there is a lineup of antique cars to ogle, 27 in all, valued at more than $1 million.  At the end of a busy day a spa awaits to offer massages (Thai, Swedish, or facial, with designated rooms for each), a tanning room if nagging clouds have obscured the Slavic sun, and a fully functional gym to tone muscles left untried.  Dinner awaits in either of two formal dining rooms or a restaurant housed in a Spanish warship afloat on a manmade lake.  Before bedtime, nightcaps are poured into crystal glasses in the wood-paneled bar.
            Were these the delights on offer at a five-star resort on the Black Sea coast?  No, they awaited guests of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych at Mezhyhiriya, site of his country home until he fled to Russia on February 21, 2014, following a flurry of nationwide protests.  Until then he could lay claim to the dacha of all dachas, funded through the proven combination of political savvy, ritual payoffs, exploitation of bureaucratic loopholes, and ability to pull the strings of power so that the Ukrainian state would become a puppet in the service of his personal needs, and tastes.
            Mezhyhiriya is a land of low rolling hills and woodland along the Dnipro River.  As expected, its history is as knotty as the rest of Ukraine.  Mezhyhiriya got its start as the site of a monastery built in 1786, but the next year it was burned to the ground, allegedly on the order of Catherine the Great.  One hundred years later it was resurrected as a convent, but its lease on life was cut short in 1923, when the Bolsheviks ordered it closed following the Russian Revolution.  For a few years Mezhyhiriya served as a school for ceramics production, and then a retreat for Communist Party bosses until Nazi officer Erich Koch chose it as his home during the German occupation of World War II.
How Yanukovych came to acquire Mezhyhiriya is something of a case study in the mechanisms of Ukrainian corruption.  He came of age in the hardscrabble province of Donetsk in the post-Soviet 1990s, when organized crime was the primary industry in the region.  In his teens he did jail time for robbery and assault, but worked hard enough on polishing his image to become the governor of Donetsk in 1997.  Five years later he was appointed prime minister by president Leonid Kuchma and was given one of the buildings at Mezhyhiriya that had been lying idle in the Fund for State Property for his exclusive use.  Yanukovych had quickly learned the tricks of Ukraine’s political trade.  The following year he was able to rent another building through a state charity based in Donetsk, under the condition it would be used for “the promotion of national and international programs aimed at improving socioeconomic status.”  He paid 80 cents a year in rent.
Old habits die hard, and no harder than in countries long governed by the backdoor rules of cronyism, prestige, and financial leverage.  He cozied up to big business interests, including billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, founder of the System Capital Management Group, a conglomerate involved in mining, energy, banking, insurance, telecommunications, and real estate.  Government positions from the police department and taxation to diplomatic posts and heads of government agencies were filled with “friends of Yanukovych,” mainly from the Donetsk region.
In 2004, Yanukovych saw an opportunity to run for the presidency but was defeated by Viktor Yushchenko in a closely contested race that ended in a runoff.  Six years later he tried again and this time defeated professed reformer and prime minister Yulia Timoshenko, and he was savvy enough to wrap himself in a reformist cloak.  Shortly after taking power he stated: “Bureaucracy and corruption are today hiding behind democratic slogans in Ukraine. . . . because a small handful of people who have been plundering the country for 20 years, from which the whole society, the whole state and our image in the world have been suffering.”
The masquerade didn’t last.  A year later Yanukovych found himself dutifully following the autocrat’s playbook.  Rival Timoshenko was thrown in jail on trumped up charges of corruption.  Yanukovych sought to see Russian declared an official language, rejected NATO membership in favor of Ukraine becoming a neutral, nonaligned state, and appeased Vladimir Putin by pushing for an agreement on the status of Russia’s Black Sea fleet at the port of Sebastopol—a move that arguably emboldened Putin to seize the entire Crimea four years later.
But Yanukovych had overplayed his hand.  Ukrainians had had enough.  Near the end of 2013 protestors filled central Kiev and came onto the streets in other cities.  They, too, had been hardened in the realities of Ukrainian politics, having faced down security forces in another uprising in 2004.  Yanukovych saw the writing on the wall.  In February 2014 he fled Kiev for the eastern city of Kharkiv, and from there hopped over the border for safe haven in Russia after a warrant was issued for his arrest.  The charge—the mass murder of protestors.
The Orange Revolution of 2014 ended Yanukovych’s plans for control of the Ukrainian government, and his hold on Mezhyhiriya.  Yushchenko and Timoshenko became president and prime minister.  Yanukovych was shown the exit and evicted from Mezhyhiriya.  Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the next prime minister, estimated that within two years of Yanukovych’s time in office $2 billion in bribes were paid to officials across the government spectrum—senior judges, members of parliament, the election commission, international organizations, and anyone else who could benefit from, and offer benefits to, the Yanukovych regime.  And during his hold on power government funds worth $70 billion were spirited out of the country.  Yanukovych’s net worth today is estimated at $12 billion, yet in his entire career as a government functionary his salary never topped $2,000 a month.
I had read a great deal about Mezhyhiriya in both the mainstream and tabloid press, but reading is first cousin to hearsay, while seeing is believing.  So one cold, cloudy December day in Kiev I decided to head out to the suburbs to see it for myself.  I took the M3 metro line to its terminal station and there hopped on the 902 bus for the last leg of the trip. 
Earlier I had read that a spanking-new highway had been built to link Mezhyhiriya to Kiev so the president could rush to his country retreat untrammeled by local traffic.  But the road from the M3 metro to the gates of Mezhyhiriya would have passed for standard issue just about anywhere in Ukraine.  Once it leaves the Heroiv Dnipro metro station it passes through Kiev suburbia, lined with the customary cordon of shopping complexes, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants.  As it approaches Mezhyhiriya the townhouses become spacious villas girdled with walls and fences, and the cars in their driveways rise in price and resale value.  This is hardly Yanukovych’s world—far from it, and far below it—but it does represent the expanding upper class that benefits from contacts with oligarchs and the nouveau riche who feed from the trough of politicians like Yanukovych.  
Soon enough the bus reached its end point—a tiny parking lot across from a large sign that announced, in English, “Mezhyhiriya National Park.”  But no English was spoken at the tiny ticket kiosk at the entrance gate.  A tinier plastic window slid open and the woman on the other side snapped at me when I tried to ask about the widely advertised guided tour.  I paid for my ticket, she pointed toward the gate, and the window slid shut.
There was no one to punch my ticket so I walked on through.  A pair of security guards in olive drab fatigues with wool stocking caps pulled over their heads stomped their feet to ward off the winter chill.  One recognized the word “excursion” and waved vaguely beyond a stand of trees and in the direction of I knew not what.
I wandered deeper into the grounds, crossed over a bridge that spanned one of Yanukovych’s many manmade ponds.  The bridge and the pond and the rolling greenery evoked an Asian garden, even in December, but the marble busts perched on pedestals tried to mimic the architectural glory of Versailles, Peterhof, and Schonbrunn.  They served as a rude transition from commoner’s Kiev, with its crowded, rumbling metro and irregular bus service, and the make-believe world of the oligarch class.
Yet aside from the stone heads and odd security guard, the grounds were empty.  Further ahead a plume of colored balloons floated in the breeze at the entrance to a bland, squat building that turned out to be the Mezhyhiriya souvenir shop.  I popped in, more to get warm than with any hope of getting reliable information about the tours. 
Cotton linen shirts and blouses embroidered with geometric peasant patterns hung on the walls.  Hand-carved wooden knickknacks were piled in plastic bins.  It wasn’t so much a shop as a shrine to rural Ukrainian culture, as most souvenir shops are in Ukraine these days.  Ever since the Russian invasion of 2014 half of Ukraine has become a flea market peddling resurgent nationalism wrapped in the homespun symbolism of the heartland.  It stirs the memory of a time, illusory it may be, before complex geopolitics made the world, well—more complicated.
The clerk was immersed in his smartphone and hardly noticed me enter.  Were tours running?  The sign at the entrance gate said they were conducted daily at two o’clock.  I raised two fingers.
He held up a printed sign the size of a piece of paper and pointed to a phone number.  I tried it.  A voice answered, and I asked about a tour, or “excursion.”  There was a grumbled reply, and the line went dead.
The clerk had returned to his smartphone game.  I got his attention, pointed to my own phone, and shrugged.  He put his game on pause and tried a different number.  There was an answer.  He babbled to someone on the other end, cut off, and then led me out the door.
“Five,” he said, extending as many fingers.
I shrugged.
“Five,” he said again.  “Five,” and this time pointed around the corner of the building.  “Five!” he repeated, and then returned to his cave of warmth and the distraction of his video game.
I did as I was told, took two right turns but found nothing but a locked glass door and large adjoining window filled with a paper mache mockup of Viktor Yanukovych.  I waited, beat my feet together.  A guard or two strolled along the footpath, and a woman with two children bundled into bright, puffy parkas the color of gumballs.  I felt like a fool, standing idle in the December chill, but after a few minutes the door rattled open and a man appeared wrapped in a flag—not the blue and yellow banner of modern Ukraine but one comprised of two black and red stripes and embroidered with the tryub, a slender, aquiline trident that appears on T-shirts and coffee mugs, soldier’s graves and flower arrangements, and has become independent Ukraine’s national symbol.  The flag itself evoked a whiff of déjà vu—it had been the standard of the Ukrainian Liberation Army in its struggle against the Nazi occupation in World War II.  Throughout the former Soviet Union history is a stain that continues to bleed through the fabric of the present day.
The man draped in red and black was Petro Oliynyk.  Petro was from the western city of Lviv, which languished under Polish rule for almost 600 years before the carve-up of eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War I pass it to the control of the Soviet Union.  Petro had run a grocery store in Lviv but came to Kiev in 2014 to join the Orange Revolution that eventually toppled Yanukovych, and afterward found a second career as the guardian, host, and tour guide of the former president’s country digs.
“Health club,” Petro smirked, snapping on the lights in the separate chambers designated for massage, suntan, and facial treatments, but he saved the best for last.  Another light popped on in room where the walls were caked from floor to ceiling in sparkling white. 
“Salt,” Petro said.  He inhaled deeply.  “For the lungs.”  His grin spread wider.  The scent was thick enough to taste.  I licked my finger and rubbed it along the wall, touched it to my tongue—a taste test.  It passed.
“One person,” Petro chirped, and then he was on the move again, jangling an immense ring of keys that hinted at even more spectacles to come.
Petro led me to an underground passage that led from the gift shop entrance to the “Honka,” named for the Finnish company specializing in the construction of log buildings that built the “club house,” the modest name it acquired during Yanukovych’s salad days.  We emerged into another underground reception room.  Petro again jangled his keys and opened the gateway to a greenhouse-like corridor outfitted with tropical plants and bird cages. 
“Cockatoo,” Petro chirped, pointing at a cage where a ball of bright orange and pink feathers fluttered inside. 
Again the keys jangled.  We entered another reception room.  A dark-wood-paneled bar stocked with premier liqueurs awaited guests in a small room to the left.  Yanukovych’s tastes were definitely national budget-sized.  The bar featured bottles of Cristal, a liqueur favored by 19th-century Russian tsars.
Petro tapped the surface of a circular glass table in the center of the room.  It was at least an inch thick, with decorative frosted trim wrapped around its circumference.
“Crystal—French,” Petro snipped.
It was time to enter the main house.  An elevator awaited.  The former president of Ukraine was not going to waste precious state time climbing stairs.
Yanukovych’s summer-home elevator was double-doored, both French crystal, decorated in frosted designs.  Petro and I were now traveling within the summer cottage as the former president would have.  We reached the first floor.  More keys jangled.  Petro flipped a light switch.  A billiard table—the necessary fixture of any British aristocrat worthy of the name –filled the middle of a large drawing room.  Petro flicked his finger at on the surface of a window that overlooked the Dnipro.  A ping rang through the room.
“Crystal,” Petro added—without the ping.
He pointed to a trio of mosaic panels stretched across the back wall.  They were Mediterranean in style—Greek, ancient or modern, maybe Italian, or Roman.  Whatever their intent, they evoked a classical age.  Petro tapped the crusty glass baubles dangling from a light fixture.
“Swarovski,” he said, and again—“All for one person.”  And after the necessary pause: “Super crazy!”
The keys rattled again.  Petro flung open a door made of hand-carved cherrywood, priced at $64,000 per panel, according to Mezhyhiriya’s own accounting.  What awaited?  A dining room that sat two dozen.  Once again, crystal glass windows offered a crystal-clear view of the Dnipro.
“Crocodile,” Petro said, pointing to the leathery skin stretched out on the tabletop.  But the reptile skin wasn’t the highlight.  Petro pointed at the floor.  For the first time I noticed it—a mix of hardwoods that formed swirling patterns that drew from the interior designs of ancient Greece and Rome.
“Parquet,” Petro said.  “All Ukrainian wood.”
I rubbed a finger across the surface, the margins where the various woods and patterns met.  It was marble smooth, the entire surface untroubled by the slightest change in material or design.  Only master craftsmen could have accomplished the feat.
Petro’s keys rattled once more.  He led me into Mezhyhiriya’s private cinema.  A TV screen the size of the billiard table filled one wall, but this was would have been by obscured by the silver screen that descended, when needed, from its resting port above.  Fifteen or 20 leather recliners awaited the president’s favored audience.  Upfront, stage right and left, were a pair of overly oversized leather thrones that were intended to magnify the stature of anyone they received but in truth did the opposite, made them seem small and inconsequential.  I wondered if Yanukovych reserved these for guests he wanted to humble or himself.  My guess is the latter.
Petro and I rode the crystal elevator up another floor.  Another dining room awaited, larger than the one below.  Another giant TV screen filled the far wall.  In every room we passed there had been at least one TV screen, sometimes two, or even three, all two meters wide, all high definition, all Sony.  I asked Petro how many TV screens filled Mezhyhiriya.
“Twenty-two,” he replied.
Here the floor was even more multicolored, or multi-shaded, than the one below, and even more dazzlingly intricate.  Complex patterns were expressed in swirls and curves of brown, beige, yellow, and amber.
But enough of the floor—Petro ran his hand along the top of a chair. 
“Silk,” he said.
I ran my finger along the chair.  It was soft and as smooth at the parquet floor, the silk tightly spun, without as much as a ripple for the threads of gold brocade.
“One person?” I threw at Petro.
“Super crazy,” he replied.
The thicket of keys rattled again.  A door swung open.    Petro—host, guide, footman exemplar—offered me entrance with a sweeping gesture of his hand.  Beyond the threshold was the Honka’s holy of holies: Mezhyhiriya’s master bedroom gazes out over the Dnipro beyond a balcony separated from the main chamber by floor-to-ceiling panes of crystal.  It was as big as a New York apartment.  The cherrywood headboard stood high against the wall like an Orthodox altarpiece.  A yellow silk bedcover, putting-green smooth, stretched out below.  At the back of the room, undivided from the sleeping area, was Yanukovych’s toilette.  Petro pointed to the faucets.
“No gold,” he said, dispelling a myth of Mezhyhiriya.  Yanukovych’s golf clubs may have been golden but his water taps, which few would see, were merely gold plated.  But the floor of the shower, of walled-in glass, was real, genuine mosaic.
The household lift sped us down to the first floor and Mezhyhiriya’s showpiece—the grand salon, three stories high.  A white Steinway limited-edition piano stood in the bay window, a replica of the original that John Lennon had given to Yoko Ono.
            Petro was quick with the numbers: “Only twenty-five made.”
            The salon was several rooms in one, 18th-century style, with separate seating areas for conversation, games, musical entertainment, and since the 21st century—television.  Another cinema-size screen took pride of place above a circle of leather couches. 
            The walls glowed warm reddish brown, matching the carved ceiling, the curved double staircase, and the balcony overlooking the entire room below.
            “Cherrywood,” Petro stated, “all cherrywood,” his hand drawing a sweeping arc, taking it all in.
            Petro’s tour was wrapping up.  He fished for the last of his keys and unlocked the door that would return me to the grounds, and ultimately everyday Ukraine—the December chill and grey clouds scudding across the sky, the crowded metro, the vendors offering sausage rolls and half-liter cans of beer.  The annual profit from one of these stalls would have paid for a single Swarovski bauble at Mezhyhiriya.
            It was a bit of a walk back to the entrance gate, enough time, if I dawdled, to tally some of the costs of Mezhyhiriya.  The price for the wooden staircases—$200,000; paneling for the winter garden—$328,000; the cover for a neoclassical column and flight of steps— $430,000.  Almost $1 million was spent on imported fittings.  Each chandelier cost the Ukrainian budget $100,000.  Yanukovych spent $800 in state funds to treat his fish, $14,500 for tablecloths.   But all this pales in comparison to the $42 million spent on light fixtures.  Yanukovych also had a dreadful fear of being prisoned.  To foil possible schemers he constructed greenhouses to produce the produce of 20 different climates, to satisfy his diverse culinary tastes.  The final tab for Mezhyhiriya came in at anywhere between $80 and $100 million, all of which, to be expected, was foisted onto the Ukrainian state.
            An age-old saying says that “clothes make the man.”  Let’s take this a step further and argue that one’s house is the “clothing” in which one wraps oneself, and is therefore a projection of self one imagines themselves to be, like most clothing.  Seen that way, what did Mezhyhiriya say about Yanukovych?  What kind of man was he?  Man of the Ukrainian people?  Greek or Roman dignitary?  British or French aristocrat?  Oligarch?  All of these in a kind of wannabe manner, but in the end none of them, except in a wannabe manner?
            I nodded goodbye to the remaining guards at the entrance, still stomping their feet to fend off the now late-afternoon chill.  As for Yanukovych, and other megalomaniacs like him, the only explanation came from Petro, who had seen his life up close and yet had a commoner’s distance to make an informed judgment: “Super crazy!”
 
 
 
 

​          I can’t stand the ocean.  I don’t want to even touch the water with my foot.  The hot sand burns the soles of my feet and the freezing water turns my skin red.  I go anyways.  I burn up in the sun but the other people around me love the ocean.  So I stay longer.  It hurts me but I’m here for other people.  I shouldn’t be so selfish.  Seafoam washes over my feet and I cringe.  I want to leave this place but I stay anyways.  I don’t want to swim in the ocean but friends tell me they want to go paddleboarding.  I don’t want to be left out, so I go. I stare down into the dark, deep, black ocean and fear rises in my heart.  I hate having to stand on the board, my eyes darting down to the crushing waves underneath.  If I fall off, it’s over.  I can swim but I won’t want to.  There’s nothing under the paddleboard, but my mind starts playing tricks on me.  I know this because my friends are laughing and talking, they don’t see the dark shadows near us or the trail of ripples in the water that I do.  So it’s my imagination, it’s just not real.  I’m just tired and hateful, just like everyone always says.  I want to prove them wrong so bad.  My friend rocks the paddleboard, laughing at my blanched white face.  Now I don’t think I’m seeing things in the water.  I think there are things swimming around us.  I panic.  My friend thinks she knows why, she thinks that I’m only panicking because I don’t want to be in the ocean. 
            So she flips the paddleboard over into the cold, dark ocean water.
            I said that if I were to fall, it would be over.
            I was right.