Subject: Kimbap in Kathmandu We've made it. Tonight I'm writing to you from a cybercafe instead of a
PC-bang. Yesterday we woke up in Korea, had a gorgeous Chinese lunch in Hong
Kong, and then for dinner ate Tibetan momos and drank butter tea: three
currencies in a single jetlag-extended day.
Kathmandu has its own smell which is completely unlike the asphalt tang of
New York or the sour smoke-and-pickles of Seoul. It's a mix of incense and
burning butter, diesel and dust and cardamom. Four years ago that
smell seemed so exotic, but today it felt like home. The rickshaws, the
thanka shops, the "Yes, hello, good price" doesn't phase me at all. Well,
okay, maybe a little bit, but I can't get over how normal it feels. Korea
with all its modern trappings feels like the foreignness I'm shrugging off;
I'm far more at ease in Kathmandu's clutter and tradition and willful
exoticism.
Today we had an early breakfast — fried Tibetan bread with marmalade, chai,
fried potatoes, salt-butter tea — then walked down to Durbar Square at the
center of town. On the way we wandered into a temple where a crowd of men
and women sat on a small platform singing, playing cymbals and harmoniums,
chanting. Inside was a Buddhist monk along with the Hindu mendicants and
pilgrims. Later we made the long hike up to Swayambu, the Monkey Temple,
another Hindu-Buddhist holy site in this endlessly multicultural country.
Inside one shrine, Tibetan Buddhist monks (some of them Westerners) played
gongs and horns and conches, sending up a fabulous racket, while outside
Indian tourists swirled about the great white Buddhist dome that dominates
the temple complex. In the afternoon we wandered around the tourist district
of Thamel, looking at crafts and clothes and books.
Nepal is astonishingly beautiful, whether you're looking at a clothing stall
or a 16th-century temple, a painted rickshaw or a tiny Ganesh shrine. The
culture here is intensely alive. At the most obscure shrines as at the World
Heritage temple sites, the daily business of worship goes on, with all the
wear and tear it causes to ancient statues caked in bits of rice and color,
to great fences of prayer-wheels, to the gates that protect a holy relic at
the core of a great pagoda temple. Butter lamps and incense burn everywhere.
Bells ring. People chant. People fly by on motorcycles or sell each other
hair brushes and copper bowls.
In Korea, I felt like the culture was buried, stifled. I don't mean to say
that somehow the unmodernized ritual of Nepal is more authentic than pop
music; it's more than that, and more vague. I don't yet have a theory to
explain it or the relevant examples to demonstrate why, but the tiniest
slices of Kathmandu thrill me more than the greatest monuments of Korea.
Anyway, we've made it. We're here. this is a place I have longed to return
to for many years, and it's very, very good to be back.
More relaxed than I've been in a year,
PS: In our wanders today we discovered a Korean restaurant with a menu all
in Hangeul. You can get kimbap, bibimbap, twechi galbi. But we won't. I'll
admit that Korean food was never my favorite; we are incredibly thrilled to
be surrounded by Tibetan and Indian cuisine.
--
Subject: Eating Well, but Cautiously Kathmandu is famous for its densely packed, medieval Old City, full of
temples, shrines, stupas, gods, goddesses, ornate wooden windows, clouds of
incense, bolts of sari cloth, rows of butter lamps flickering next to
rickshaws; it is also famous for Thamel, the overcrowded tourist haven where
they show the latest movies in all the cafes and the food is indescribably
fabulous and very poor men from the hills follow you around trying to sell
you horrible little violins and chess sets. Caught between the obsequious
desperation of Thamel and the picturesque poverty further downtown, one
begins to feel claustrophobic; you are assailed by the notion that all the
wealth and luxury in the country is reserved for the foreigners.
Yesterday we decided to wander away from the touristed parts of town, across
the thoroughfare of Kantipath and into the flow of ordinary Nepalis in the
newer part of town. There we found the shops where the better-off women can
buy their shalwar kameez (traditional dress and pants) and their more modern
clothes. We sat in a park where Nepalis relaxed, groups of young men and the
occasional couple. We sat in an Internet shop next to well-dressed Nepali
boys with glasses who were browsing Australian cricket websites. It was
reassuring to discover that there is indeed a middle class here, albeit a
very, very small one. As Jenny put it, she had begun to wonder if people
with money here simply spent it differently than do people everywhere else.
It turns out that they don't; as in the rest of the world, people want a
bigger house on a street where they can park their car. They want nice
clothes and good food and satellite dishes. And such things do exist here.
In discovering them, we felt we had deepened our sense of Kathmandu
considerably. It's worth keeping perspective on just how tiny and tenuous
this middle class might be, but it's instructive to see the choices that
have been made by those lucky enough to be successful.
*
Today we awoke to discover that the king had sacked the prime minister,
dissolved the parliament and assumed executive power. According to the
papers, the king was actually attempting to reinforce democracy; his
justification was that the PM had failed to arrange for the elections
scheduled for November 14th, and had instead agreed with all other parties
to postpone them for a year.
In the tourist neighborhood of Thamel, we noticed that the mood was
strangely subdued, with many of the shops closed. At first we wondered if it
was the political situation that had changed the atmosphere, but then we
realized that today is Saturday, the Nepali day off.
In general, the response has been fairly low-key. A small, well-ordered
demonstration marched up the street in Thamel in support of the king. When
you ask people about democracy here — which has been the mode of government
since a popular uprising in 1990 — they universally tell you it's been a
failure. According to the owner of our hotel, tax money disappears into
politicians' pockets, development goes nowhere, and in rural areas the
Maoist rebels "tax" the locals, demanding protection money. Industry is
down, jobs are scarce, and the instability in the region is keeping many of
the tourists away.
Nepalis are cold in their hearts, the hotelier went on, about the present
situation and also about the king. Before the royal massacre he was the
unpopular brother of the now-late king, and Nepalis are wary of him, but
they have no one else to turn to. Whether it's true or not, I have no idea,
but our hotelier told us the Chinese give money to the Maoists, while the
Indians support the corrupt politicians. The king is their only hope for
change, though they don't seem especially confident.
In the meantime, we are still here in Kathmandu, where the world is
decidedly not coming to an end. We have been eating fabulously: lavish
breakfasts of eggs and sausage and muesli in yogurt; buff steak and chicken
Kiev; potato momos and lightly spiced thalis. We're taking things easy,
reading a lot, wandering some, shopping a little. And we're enjoying the
version of Western culture that the Nepalis reflect back at us. In Korea,
Americans are either soldiers or businesspeople (teachers are in the latter
category), and Korea's rendition of Western culture involves cowboy bars,
prostitutes and bad spaghetti. The visitors here are of a different order:
hippies, religious seekers, mountaineers, ecotourists, people with an
interest in art and culture. Portishead and Tom Waits waft from CD shops and
bars, mingling with Indian and fusion music, and with the ubiquitous New Age
"Om Mani Padme Hum" CD. Instead of T-shirts with Bill the Cat drinking soju,
we're offered pretty sweaters and "I Love Buddhism" stickers. Instead of
bars named "Nashville" and "Starbutts," there are lodges with names like
"Pacifist" and "Peace." Instead of Popeye's Chicken, there's fresh brown
bread.
Tomorrow we will go to Kopan Monastery as planned, and we'll stay there
until the meditation course ends on October 16th. By that time our Indian
visas will be ready (we went to the embassy yesterday), so we can reassess
the political situation and leave then if necessary. Hopefully, though,
we'll be able to stick to our plans and go trekking. To put things in some
perspective, we're happy that there are no Al Qaeda cells, anthrax-laced
letters or rooftop snipers wandering loose around here. And yes, we'll be
careful.
Happy and well fed,
--
Subject: The Buddha, Purity and Rubber Lovin' I went to Kopan Monastery looking for spirituality. Unfortunately, what I
got was religion instead.
Tibetans are the Catholics of the Buddhist world, and medieval Catholics at
that. They see themselves as the keepers of the only complete lineage
directly from the Buddha, and therefore the sole possessors of the complete
path to Enlightenment (as opposed to mere Nirvana — and no, I will not
explain the difference). Their temples are elaborately decorated with
dragons, deities, incarnations, emanations, flames, clouds, animals and
symbols. So are their metaphysics. As in medieval Europe, the monasteries
are the centers of practice and learning, as well as the wealthiest
institutions around. And as with the Catholics in those days, the Tibetan
Buddhists aren't really sure what to make of the laity, who are largely
uneducated in the complex theology considered necessary for real spiritual
progress. And just as the monks of Europe famously argued over how many
angels could dance on the head of a pin, the Tibetan monks engage in lively
debate over the most abstruse points of metaphysics, the only empirical
points of reference being the scriptures and their own meditative
experiences.
Even so, the real problems with the course had to do with the Western nun
who was teaching it. Karin Valham is a Swedish ex-Catholic who spent her
wild years floating around Southeast Asia in a druggy haze and then found
God on a small hill full of Tibetan refugees. Within a year of her arrival
at Kopan in 1974, she had already become a nun in the order. To a great
extent, then, what she found compelling about Tibetan Buddhism couldn't have
been its philosophy, at least not primarily. She mentioned at one point that
coming to Kopan felt like coming home, and she explained that she chose
Buddhism over her native Catholicism because the former gave her a more
distinct program of practice. As such, her Buddhism tended to come across as
a kind of crypto-Catholicism. Our course began with a catechism in some of
the most hard-to-believe aspects of Tibetan Buddhism — reincarnation and
karma and the various realms of existence — and stayed grimly focused on
how we must spend this lifetime preparing ourselves for a better rebirth and
fearing a rebirth into the hell realms. The words "purity" and "virtue" came
up far more often than "compassion." There were also a number of guided
meditations on the glowing light of the omniscient Buddha, which felt an
awful lot like letting the light of Christ fill our hearts.
With this cosmology went an ideology of retreat from engagement with the
world. She bragged about lay practitioners who took on severely onerous
"purifications" (read "penances"), such as chanting a mantra 400,000 times
or making 100,000 prostrations to the Buddha; and about those who went on
the most extreme retreats, like a married couple who built themselves
separate shacks in the Vermont woods and stayed hidden away for three years.
On our final day, she proposed to give us a talk on how to bring our
Buddhism with us into the world. She recommended that we find quiet spaces
to meditate, that we go about the world chanting mantras (which she
described as "mind protectors"), that we visit dharma centers in our own
countries. She even suggested that we go sit in churches and meditate. In
other words, her idea of how to be Buddhist in the world was to find as many
ways as possible of retreating from it. Such an approach seems completely
out of synch with the Buddhism I've read about in books by Thich Nhat Hanh,
Pema Chodron, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, D.T. Suzuki and the Dalai Lama, and
the Tibetan monks at the monastery didn't seem to share it. Considering how
regularly Karin was wrong or confused about other subjects and how poorly
she answered questions, I came to doubt her understanding of Tibetan
Buddhism. She was clearly out of her depth when she engaged in philosophical
debate with us, discussed current events or talked about science. I didn't
trust her intellectually, so I was unable to trust her teachings on the
subject at hand.
Karin's most bizarre performance came on the fifth day, when she gave us her
brief history of Buddhism and Tibet. She declared that the Buddhists and
Hindus never engaged in combat, only in intellectual debate, which makes me
wonder whether the great Buddhist emperor Ashoka simply talked his way to
power across all of northern India. She also seemed to believe that the
Muslims waged a great holy war to eradicate Buddhism in India, which simply
never happened. In her version of history, this jihad nearly wiped out
Buddhism, and only the Tibetans managed to carry off the complete teachings
of the Buddha. She spoke disparagingly of the "Hinayana" Buddhist
practitioners (they prefer the term "Theravada") who trace their lineage to
the Sri Lankan transmission of the Buddha's teachings, and who constitute
most of the Buddhists in Southeast Asia. Later, in explaining Buddhism's
decline in Indonesia, she guessed that the Muslims came there and made war,
because "That's just their way." (Actually, Islam came to Indonesia by way
of peaceful merchants.) This whole history came just after a declaration
that Buddhism isn't sectarian and has no missionaries, and just before she
proudly told us how her branch of Buddhism is running TV shows in Mongolia
to help spread the Buddha's teachings there and combat the Christian
missionaries, whom she regarded as some kind of demonic presence leading the
people astray. ("They pay people to go to church!" she hissed; a couple of
days later we sat in on a lengthy puja [prayer ceremony] during which the
kids were all handed crisp new 50-rupee notes and plastic bags full of junk
food. To be fair, though, the recipients were all monks who already lived at
the monastery.) When Jenny bravely raised her hand to ask why the TV show
wasn't missionary activity, Karin explained that it was because the
Mongolians were already Buddhists and had simply forgotten during the years
of Soviet domination. Jenny and I were appalled, and we considered leaving
after that; Jenny's roommate had already declared Karin "a mean old nun" and
slipped away on the third day. (Men and women stay in separate rooms at the
monastery.)
In the end, we decided to stay. Despite Karin's shortcomings as a teacher,
there was much to value at Kopan. Each morning we woke up at
5:45, a few minutes before sunrise, and wandered over to the dining hall for
cups of tea as we watched the sun come up over the mountains, setting alight
the streams of fog that ran along the bends and crevaces of the Kathmandu
Valley below. As we sipped quietly — we maintained silence until lunchtime
— we could hear the monks chanting and playing their horns and conches and
cymbals in the main gompa (meditation hall) across from us. By 6:30 it was
time for our morning meditations, which tended to focus on quieting the mind
and developing concentration and mental focus. For all my doubts about
Karin, she did teach us some useful techniques, and it was a worthwhile
experience simply to have the discipline to meditate for an hour each
morning for ten days straight. After a long break for breakfast, we went for
the morning teachings from 9:15 to 11:45 — the source of all the trouble.
Then came lunch — typically Indian and Nepali food, and quite good. At 2 in
the afternoon we broke into lively discussion groups, each of which had a
young monk to answer our questions.
At 3:30 we had a class with a geshe (a Tibetan doctor of philosophy) who was
teaching Westerners for the first time. He was sweet enough, if a bit shy
and unsure what to do with us. His translator, though, was an energetic young man who is taking time off from Buddhist monk college to
await the arrival of the reincarnation of his guru, Lama Konchog, who died
one year ago. The afternoon sessions were often hard to follow, but the
geshe was teaching us a specific book — The 37 Practices of a Boddhisattva
— so we knew he wasn't just making it all up out of his head, something I
began to worry was happening in our morning sessions with Karin. Also unlike
Karin, the geshe was willing to admit it when he didn't know the answer to a
question. And the cultural differences made for some entertaining moments. In a
discussion about karma in which good looks and riches in this life were
ascribed to good deeds in past lives, someone asked whether that meant the
people of Hollywood all had the best karma. "Hollywood is in America?"
responded the translator. At another point, we were informed that sexual
misconduct included incest, rape, doing it in holy places or in front of
holy objects, and doing it during the day. At the end of the session, an
earnest young German man raised his hand to ask why it was wrong to have sex
during the day. After a lengthy back-and-forth between the geshe and the
translator, the translator blushed and told us that he'd made a mistake. The
point, apparently, was just not to have sex where others were likely to see
you. This made far more sense to us.
It was also much earthier and more humane than Karin's warning that we
shouldn't put our Buddha statues next to the bed, because we should feel
embarrassed about having sex in front of him, even though "He sees all, he
knows all." In the evenings, before and after dinner, we had sessions of
guided meditation with Karin, and these were in some ways even more
problematic than her teachings. They tended to require detailed
visualizations of the very concepts we found unbelievable. For example, in
one meditation we tried to generate compassion for all the millions of goats
that were slaughtered for the Hindu festival of Dassain. That was fine, but
I got into trouble when we were supposed to start imagining all these goats
in the Bardo — a mystical realm where minds hang out before rebirth,
apparently with a maximum stay of 49 days (and no, I didn't ask what
constituted a day in the Bardo). Worse yet, we were supposed to pray that
these goats would all receive "precious human rebirths" that would allow
them to practice Buddhism. That's all well and good, but there are a limited
number of human conceptions that can possibly take place in the next 49
days, and we'd been told that there are "countless" minds in the Bardo at
any given time; thus, when we were praying for the goats to get into human
rebirths, we were necessarily praying against some other beings. Either
that or we were hoping for some kind of apocalyptic scenario in which there
would be trillions of human births and no animal births for the forseeable
future. So here I was with my mathematical conundrum, and I still had a half
an hour to sit there and meditate on this nonsense. After dinner was even
worse, as we tended to meditate on various deities, and never as metaphor.
(Curiously, Karin used the term "deity," not "incarnation" or "emanation.")
Much as I was trying to keep an open mind, I simply couldn't take seriously
a literal interpretation of a thousand-armed, eleven-faced god of
compassion.
To some extent, I think Karin's approach and our difficulties with it were
generational. The baby boomers who came to Asia were looking for grand
visions and exotic mysticism; it was the age of Carlos Castaneda and LSD. A
couple of the older students seemed to be looking for just that sort of
revelation. They were what people in the Neo-Pagan community refer to as
"white-lighters," people who are looking for mystic visions around every
corner. They tended to discuss mediums and reiki very earnestly. Most of us,
though, were of a younger and more practical generation. We want techniques,
not visions, and we don't think the East has a monopoly on wisdom. We're
hear to learn, not to believe.
So as Karin herself put it, if nothing else, we had a chance to practice
patience. We also had a fascinating evening with Lama Lundrup, Kopan's
abbot, a charming little man with a fantastic laugh that he used liberally.
He spent an hour and a half answering our questions straightforwardly and
with genuine wisdom. When I asked him what to do about the poverty and
suffering that I saw around me here in Nepal and in India, he said to learn
as much as I could about a particular situation, then get involved in a
knowledgeable way; he suggested that I find a way to support education, as
this was vital to the future of the communities I wanted to help. His answer
was sensible, compassionate and engaged; until that point, I'd gotten the
sense that the Tibetan Buddhist way of helping others was to sit on a
mountain and send them "positive merit." Later we watched a film about
another lama who had spent decades living in caves in the mountains. At
first his life seemed like the very model of retreat, but as the video
progressed, it became clear that much of his time as a hermit was
actually spent building a school and nunnery for the local community,
helping to finance it, teaching there, and ministering to the villagers.
That was the Buddhism I'd come to learn more about. While I can see the
value in taking breaks to renew oneself, I have no intention of becoming a
monk on a mountain or retreating from the world. In any spiritual practice,
what I am seeking is not a way to hide from the world, but a way to live in
it fully, richly, compassionately, peacefully and happily. Meditation and
reflection are vital if one is to act with wisdom — to use what Buddhists
call "skillful means." But the real test comes outside of the meditation
hall, in the grit and confusion of everyday life.
Back in our hotel room in Kathmandu, I put on my headphones and listened to the neurotic
funk of Macy Gray, an antidote if ever there was one to too much talk of
purity and virtue. And there it was, as clear a statement of the Buddha's
teachings as I'd heard in all my time at Kopan: "Spread your rubber lovin',
and it'll bounce right back to you." And when Macy says it, I believe it.
Living life as fully as I know how,
--
Subject: Is It Real? The other day Jenny and I were riding in a taxi to Patan, the Kathmandu Valley's
second-largest city. The driver and I had gone through the standard
formalities: "Which country?" "USA." "Ah! Good country!" "Thank you." "This
Nepal first time?" "Second time. I came here before in 1997." "Ah!
Two-thousand-two."
After a moment of silence, the driver spoke up again. "Can I ask you a
question?"
"Sure. Go ahead."
"You know American wrestling? On TV?"
"Yes."
The driver peered into his mirror to see my face. "The fighting," he said.
"Is it real?"
As an emissary of American culture, it was my sad duty to tell this Nepali
man that no, it's not real. "But so many people watching!" he objected. I
explained that it was all stunts, like watching a magic show.
*
The central square of Patan is densely packed with temples, palaces and
statues. Patan used to be its own kingdom, but now the royal palace has been
marvelously restored in a fusion of modern and traditional styles and turned
into one of the best museums Jenny or I have ever visited anywhere in the
world (see http://www.asianart.com/patan-museum/). Focusing mainly on Nepali
brass and stone statuary, it manages to make sense out of the richly complex
iconography of Hinduism and Buddhism. The texts are detailed and clear, and
the art, generally of very high quality, is exquisitely displayed. There are
also photos and etchings of Kathmandu and Patan from the late 19th century.
The contrast with similar exhibits in Korea is striking. There, the
difference between Seoul in 1955 — a devastated wasteland — and Seoul by
the 1980s is almost total. Here, by contrast, the main squares look almost
exactly the same (sometimes with an extra temple or two that toppled in the
1934 earthquake), and the people too look similar. You see fewer turbans
today, and the men tend to dress in Western clothing, but the women are
still in saris, although the shalwar kameez has largely displaced them among
younger women.
When we emerged from the museum, a boy in the square pointed us toward a
monumental carved doorway into the courtyard of an adjacent palace. "Come
see! Ritual!" he shouted. Inside the courtyard we discovered a mostly Nepali
group of spectators ringing a troupe of masked dancers who shivered and
twitched to the rhythms as several young men played bell cymbals and an
older man drummed and crooned a strange wordless chant. In the center,
one dancer paid elaborate homage to the bloody severed head of a buffalo,
next to which an assistant held a butter torch. Eventually the dancers were
all given swords covered in tikka (colored powder used for rituals), and they
began a slow, whirling group dance.
I can make guesses as to what the ceremony was about, but what stands out is
its very strangeness — the wild, matted hair of the masks; the old men
underneath dressed as tribal women with earings and bracelets and necklaces;
the hypnotic clang of the cymbals and the ragged line of the old man's
wordless singing; the raw power of the sacrificed head still trickling
blood.
At last the dancers and musicians formed a procession and disappeared
through a side door, and the ritual was over. We walked back out into the
square, the ever-present New Age strains of a popular "Om Mani Padme Hum" CD
competing for our attention with the cries of taxi drivers.
*
On another day we visited Bhaktapur, the third-largest city in the valley
and probably the most beautiful. At a slight remove from Kathmandu and
Patan, Bhaktapur has a feel all its own. For one thing, auto traffic is
largely banned there, which makes wandering its streets a peaceful respite
from the Kathmandu experience. But there's more to it than that. Bhaktapur
is a center for wood carving, and building after building has spectacular
doors and windows and roof struts — not just in the main squares, but even
down alleyways and in side streets. At this time of year, every available
courtyard is covered with mats on which grain is drying. Women toss the
grain with hoes, and clouds of chaff blow on the breeze. We wandered here
and there through the streets until we came to the river (which
unfortunately smells like a sewer). We sat for a time at Ram Ghat, where
hundreds of Shiva and Buddha and Nandi and Parvati statues and lingams are
packed together. Despite their sheer bewildering density and number, the
fresh tikka and offerings proved them to be well attended. Close to the
water, a Brahmin was going carefully through an offering of sweets and
giving ritual assistance to the small family who had brought them. From a
window above us came the sound of students practicing harmonium and tabla.
*
Back in Kathmandu we've been eating and sleeping and reading, and we've
fallen into a bit of a daze. Tonight, to break the torpor, we went out to
Bouda, site of the valley's largest stupa (Buddhist dome), where in the
evening the large and thriving Tibetan community comes out to circumambulate
the base of the great monument. Old women cackle at each other between
prostrations to the Buddha. Monks line up on the ground and chant. As the
sun fades, tables appear and women cover them with butter lamps. Prayer
wheels spin. Old men chant mantras between meetings with their friends.
Little clumps of teenagers and young men climb up to the higher levels of
the stupa to get away from the adults and gossip.
A young newspaper reporter stops us for an interview. Are we scared of the
Maoists? No, we tell him. We have terrorists in our country too, but we
think that people should come and visit anyway. We'll be careful, but we
don't want to let terrorists keep us from seeing the world. We think
Americans should still come to Nepal, and they should go to New York and
Bali too.
*
Tomorrow is our last day in Kathmandu. On Thursday morning we'll take the
bus to Pokhara, and from there we'll begin our trek into the Annapurnas. I'm
looking forward to being on the move again — to traveling, as opposed to
vacationing, which is what we've been doing for much of our time here in
Kathmandu.
We'll be in touch by email from Pokhara both before and after our trek,
which should take about two weeks.
I hope you're all well!
-Josh
--
[kimbap in kathmandu]
[eating well, but cautiously]
[the buddha, purity and rubber lovin']
[is it real?]
Date: Wed Oct 2, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Sat Oct 5, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Fri Oct 18, 2002
Josh
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
Date: Tue Oct 22, 2002
"To find oneself where one has longed to be always, to a reflective mind,
gives food for thought."
- Virginia Woolf, "Orlando"
