Belgium might be a small country but for centuries it has been a crossroad of cultures, trade and intellectual exchange. It was also at the epicenter of one of the historical events that forever changed the landscape of Europe in the twentieth century: World War I. From the intricate detail of lace knitting in Brugge, to chocolate making in Brussels and abbey-beer brewing in Wallonia, Belgium has developed a rich and ever-developing culture. This tapestry of knowledge and social diversity has been exemplified by a number of important figures throughout the country’s history.

Take a moment to pause and shed light on a few of these personalities, some of whom might be less known than others. From leading intellectuals to pop and Hollywood stars, these are 10 notable people whose roots can be found in Belgium.

1. Justus Lipsius

Justus Lipsius was born in Overijse, in 1547. He studied at the Jesuit college in Cologne, and when he was sixteen he moved to the University of Leuven in Leuven. The publication of his Variarum Lectionum Libri Tres (1567), which he dedicated to Cardinal Granvelle, earned him an appointment as a Latin secretary, and a visit to Rome. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden and Leuven. One of the three EU Council’s buildings bears his name.

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2. Anna Rosalie Boch

Anna Boch was born in Saint-Vaast in 1848. Boch was a painter and her style was Neo-Impressionist. Her early works used a Pointillist technique, but she is best known for her Impressionist style which she used for most of her career. She promoted many young artists, including Vincent van Gogh, whom she admired for his talent and who was a friend of her brother Eugène Boch. She was the only person ever to buy one of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings while he was still alive.

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Besides her own paintings, Boch held one of the most important collections of Impressionist paintings of her time. Boch donated some of her paintings to various museums including the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. She is buried in the Ixelles Cemetery, in Brussels.

3. Adolphe Sax

Born in 1814 the city of Dinant in Namur province, Sax showed early signs of musical talent and curiosity. He could play the flute and clarinet, and was a remarkable singer. His father, Charles-Joseph, was a maker of musical instruments and nourished Adolphe’s musical drive. Sax patented the new saxophone family of instruments in 1846 in Paris, where the Belgian inventor was a living at the time.

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4. Lily Boeykens

Liane “Lily” Boeykens, was born in 1930 in Dendermonde. She was a leading Belgian feminist of the second wave of feminism. She was also active internationally. She was a pioneer in the field of women’s equality and emancipation. From 1972 to 1992, she was president of the National Council of Women and co-founder of the Vrouwen Overleg Komitee (VOK). She organized the first National Women’s Day in Belgium on 11 November 1972. She died November 22, 2005 in Antwerp.

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5. Jean Baptiste ‘Django’ Reinhardt

Reinhardt was born in 1910 in Liberchies, Pont-à-Celles, Belgium, into a family of Manouche Romani descent. He was the first major jazz talent to emerge from Europe. Reinhardt’s most popular compositions have become standards within gypsy jazz, including “Minor Swing”, “Daphne”, “Belleville”, “Djangology”, “Swing ‘42”, and “Nuages”. He died in 1953, aged 43, in Samois-sur-Seine, France.

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6. Marie Moke Pleyel

Marie Pleyel was a Belgian pianist, born in 1811 in Paris. His father, Jean Jacques Moke, was a language teacher from Torhout, Flanders. She was one of the most famous virtuosos of the 19th century. Engaged to Hector Berlioz in 1830, she broke up at her mother’s instigation and married Camille Pleyel, son of the composer and piano maker Ignace Joseph Pleyel. Marie Pleyel was highly respected on the European music scene. She died on March 30th, 1875 in Saint-Josse-ten-Noode, in Brussels.

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7. René Magritte

René Magritte was born in Lessines, Belgium, in 1898. His work is known for challenging observers’ preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art and conceptual art. He moved to Paris and became friends with André Breton and became involved in the Surrealist group. Fans can see a collection of his work at the Magritte Museum in Brussels and in Jette, where the surrealist painter lived. He died of pancreatic cancer on 15 August 1967, aged 68.

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8. Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born in Ixelles in 1929. Her father was Joseph Ruston, the Director of the Brussels branch of the Bank of England, and Ella Van Heemstra. Hepburn starred in films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady. In 1953, at the age of 23, she received an Academy Award for best actress for her role in Roman Holiday. Some of her most successful movies are Sabrina (1954), War and Peace (1956), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and My Fair Lady (1964). Hepburn also dedicated her life to volunteering with charitable organizations, such as UNICEF.

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9. Stromae

Paul Van Haver, Stromae, was born in Brussels in 1985. He grew up in the district of Laeken. He is mostly known for his works in the genre of the hip hop and electronic music. He came to wide public attention in 2009 with his song “Alors on danse” (from the album Cheese), which became a number one in several European countries. He has sold over 8.5 million records worldwide.

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10. Marthe Donas

Marthe Gabrielle Donas was born in Antwerp in 1885. She enrolled at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp at the age of seventeen. When WWI broke out she moved to Dublin, eventually relocating to Paris at the end of 1916. She studied at the Académies de la Grande Chaumière and Ranson, and discovered the work of André Lhote and Cubism. She became an important abstract and cubist painter and is recognized as one of the leading figures of Modernism. She died on January 31, 1967, aged 81, in Audregnies, Belgium.

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Mauricio Ruiz can be followed on Twitter and Instagram.

A little girl holds on tight to her mom’s hand while a man bends over and says something to her, hello hello, then gives her a plush toy. A rabbit. A woman offers her clementines and something hard and wavy and rugged. “Peanuts,” the woman says, “have some”. The girl holds them in her fist with suspicion. She’s never seen anything like it. Hundreds of people walk in the streets of Velpke as if in a daze. They stop to look at the bakery and shoemaker shop, at the facade of a big house. Some of them are singing, others are blowing their noses. They’re crying. On the drive from Saxony-Anhalt to the bordering town in Lower Saxony, the girl has watched her mom sob in silence the whole way. Why, she wonders. What’s happening? This is November 1989. Four days ago thousands of East Berliners have walked past stunned GDR guards and stepped into West Berlin for the first time in four decades without being harmed. The world is about to change. But what will this mean to a nation that has been split apart since 1949?

In November 2019 I traveled to Leipzig and Berlin to try to understand the impact of those events in German society, how the reunification process has shaped the current political and social landscapes in the country.

“I remember my mom going on shopping binges after reunification. Buying, yes, but sometimes just looking. It’s as if she couldn’t get over the abundance she’d never had,” says Franziska Jenrich-Tran, who thirty years after that day in Velpke, works now at the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig in charge of education and as coordinator of Schiller House. She studied in Berlin where she met her husband, a man born in West Germany to Vietnamese parents. In an old Caravan, she traveled with her mom to France, Italy, Austria. She’s enjoyed opportunities and a freedom she couldn’t have dreamed of before ’89. But the efforts to acquire that freedom had begun much earlier.

“In Leipzig I joined an environmentalist group in ’82 but others started as early as ‘78,” says Gisela Kallenbach, former Member of Parliament of Saxony and EP. Though recycling initiatives existed in the GDR — one of which was called SERO — the focus was driven by economics and the scarcity of materials rather than ecology. “The air was thick with smog and the rivers smelled rotten. It was the sulphur and phenols from the chemical factories. We had to do something about it.” Anti-nuclear armament movements also appeared in the early 80’s after the deployment of SS-20 Soviet missiles triggered NATO’s decision to install Pershing Two systems in West Germany.

The Berlin Agreement (1971) and the Helsinki Accords (1975) helped improve somewhat the respect of human rights in the GDR, and it was in this environment that peace prayers started in 1982 at Saint Nicholas church in Leipzig. People could gather and be informed about what was happening in the country and abroad. One of the most important reunions happened on September 4th, 1989, when activists knew reporters from the West were in Leipzig covering one of the large trade fairs in the city. “It was an opportunity for them to show the world what was happening here,” says Kallenbach. A month later, on October 9th, more than 70,000 people gathered in the streets after prayers in four different churches. To the surprise of everyone, the police did not take any action against them. These gatherings, known as the Peaceful Revolution, gained wider momentum and led to the fateful night in Berlin on November 9th.

Though these reunions in church were tolerated, the State Security Service (Stasi) kept a close eye on these groups. Nobody ever felt safe. “We lived in a constant state of fear,” says Kallenbach. “Fear of the consequences if you dared to step out of line.” At 14, she decided not to do her Jugendweihe or ceremony where one was expected to confirm belief in the values of socialism. She faced the consequences. “I couldn’t go to high school. I had to study in the evenings and follow distance learning.” She became a chemical engineer but it took her much longer. There was also the constant paranoia of being surveilled. Informants could be anywhere. “You had to be someone in public, and someone else at home. Everyone developed two personae in the GDR. You just had to.” People wanting to leave the GDR lost their jobs and became marginalized. They learned the consequences of being unpatriotic. Activists were given strong, physical warnings or thrown into prison. Many of them were tortured.

“I went in thinking, ‘I hope I make it alive,’” says Karl-Heinz Bomberg, who was an activist singer in the GDR, wrote a book about it and is now helping victims of trauma heal. “In the end I spent three months in prison but you never knew how long it could be. You had to brace yourself for the long run.” The son of a member of the Socialist Party (SED), Bomberg grew up in the state of Thuringia believing in the social values instilled by his father. “To give work for all the people was an important goal for society. People had a job, a home, and they felt a sense of security, at least in that regard.” In his teenage years, however, he began to feel torn. There were restrictions on travel, freedom of expression, the kinds of jobs one could do. “I wanted more. And my parents couldn’t understand my strong opposition. They had other needs. For them the status quo was enough.” After reunification, Bomberg’s father grew silent. “It was a kind of inner migration. I could sense his disappointment. He had seen corruption in the GDR. People he knew had been punished for graft and misuse of resources.” He didn’t talk much about the Peaceful Revolution with his father. It was a silent agreement of the inevitable. The changes to come. “After all his life, my father had to agree that socialism in that way could not live any longer. There were a lot of ambivalences within him.”

Ambivalences I: Perception and Change

During talks about the current political polarization across Europe, some West German friends had said to me, always with nuances, that many people in East Germany, especially the older generations, had grown too dependent on the state to conduct their lives. I wanted to dig deeper into the origins of this perception. Was it accurate, and if so, were there other aspects that ought to be considered?

“This is a delicate matter these days,” says Uwe Schwabe, who was a protagonist in the Peaceful Revolution. “Whenever there is some sort of self-criticism about the GDR, many people feel attacked. I thought by now people would take their destiny in their own hands, that they would be more proactive. A certain segment of the population is asking for somebody to solve their problems.”

Schwabe believes the transition in 1990 was too quick, that more time was needed to understand what was being changed and why. People were caught in a whirlwind of tasks: finding a new job, understanding market economy, a new social and educational system. “Many East Germans have spent their lives under two dictatorships, and this has consequences. More time was needed for reflection in society as a whole. And this reflection would have worked as a purification.” Schwabe admits many of the ideals he fought for have arrived: rule of law, respect for human rights, freedom of expression. “Many things have been successful in these 30 years. But the reunification process is not finished yet. More dialogue, more self-reflection is needed.”

Change is often marred with obstacles. It is not impossible, far from it, but the older one gets, certain routines become incrusted and it is harder to let go of them. But was this what happened to society in East Germany after hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in the 90's?

“After my mother lost her job at a metal-recycling factory in 1991, she did try to learn other skills,” says Cornelia Winkler, who grew up in East Berlin. “She worked at a water treatment plant, and she was good with kids so she was placed in schools. She redesigned schoolyards.”

In the analysis regarding the years following reunification, it’s inevitable to hear about the tide of changes hitting many East German families. But what was it like in practice? “My mother received about 800 East German Mark, while my father a little more, around 1000,” says Winkler. “I remember we had to pay 75 Eastern Mark for rent, including water and heating. After reunification, prices went up rather quickly. In 1991, for instance, I remember the rent was already 300 Mark. Very soon things became tight for us, especially after my dad lost his job at the factory too.”

Winkler was 11 when the Wall fell and was later able to move to Frankfurt and England to study. She benefitted from opportunities her parents could not. “Even if she readapted, my mom never recovered from the loss of her job. Reunification didn’t happen in a right way for her. There was disappointment in how things were turning out for many families, economically and otherwise. She became withdrawn.”

In Leipzig alone, there were about 100,000 manufacturing jobs at the end of 80’s. In the 90’s that number came down to 10,000. Statistics show that roughly 80% of East Germans of working age had to redefine themselves and change job after reunification.

The federal government has invested in developing infrastructure in East Germany, as well as giving incentives to start-ups to foster innovation and business creation there. Yet a recent survey showed that 52% of East Germans believe the reunification process was not fair. Where does this feeling stem from, and is it justified towards West Germans? “West Germany has helped the East in many ways, and I am grateful for that,” says Bomberg. “We have a strong democracy now, and many people have opportunities for self-development. But it is true that many people in the East have had a difficult time. It would be important for the West to acknowledge that too.” Among the people interviewed, many expressed the view that after reunification several things in the East were discarded blindly, considered useless without a careful analysis. “The recycling called SERO worked well, for instance,” says Winkler. “Why not further develop it instead of tearing it down?”

Dissenting opinions, however, state that by the time the Wall fell, people in the East wanted the same life as those in the West, and they wanted it fast, they just don’t remember it now. Human memory is imperfect, and it might be difficult to recall with accuracy what one wanted at first, especially after the widespread layoffs in the 90’s. Some indicators show that certain decisions were taken with sweeping speed. Why? External political forces — some leaders in France and the UK were not overly enthusiastic about reunification — plus internal election dynamics in Germany played an important role. There was also the privatization process of state-owned companies in the former GDR, for which a trust was formed (Treuhand). From a market economy perspective, there were inefficiencies that had to be addressed in many of those enterprises in the East. Redundant labor, outdated machinery. But how does economic theory account for the social and psychological effect of people having a job and feeling useful in society? Many people did ask for immediate change, they wanted to have many of the things they had seen on TV, but they were perhaps not ready to see their whole beliefs system thrown overboard so quickly. Many advocated for a ‘third way’, which meant a smoother transition. Some people from the West, not all of them, came to the East thinking that they knew how the way to make things work, and everything else was not relevant.

Ambivalence II: Losing means winning

Alexander Finger’s grandparents came to Saxony from the Czech Republic as part of the wave of German-speaking people having to leave several central and east European countries at the end of WWII. It is estimated that about 25% of the population in East Germany is a descendant of that wave of refugees. When Finger’s grandfather arrived, he was granted a plot of land by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD). This gave the family the possibility to start anew. Finger’s great-uncle migrated to West Germany where he had to start from scratch. “This resulted in my grandfather doing better than his brother,” says Finger, who works as a guide and translator at the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig. “It turned out to be an advantage to come to the GDR instead of West Germany.”

After reunification, many of the people in the East who suffered from acute health problems, chronic illnesses, had the opportunity to receive treatment in the West. Their lives were improved. In the times of the GDR there were qualified specialists who could have treated him, but there were just not enough of them. It would take a long time to get an appointment. Reunification brought an amelioration to the health of thousands of people living in East Germany.

Ambivalence III: Representation

Recent statistics show that 100% of deans at public universities come from the West, and the same applies for 97% of directors of institutes of higher research. Within the 14 federal ministries, only 3% of leaders are from the East. But what does this mean, and what are the implications?

“It is not clear to me if that matters,” says Gisela Meyer, who grew up in West Berlin meters away from the border with East Germany. “I would have thought by now whether you are from the West or East, you do what is best for your country. Is that not the case?”

Representation is not straight forward. The clearest example can be seen in the US where Asian or African American women wouldn’t be represented by a woman with the ideas of Anne Coulter, or the Hispanic community could do better than to choose Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz as someone who’d look after their needs.

So what is at stake in Germany behind the issue of representation? How does it impact life? “I’ll give you an example of why it matters,” says Member of Federal Parliament, Anke Domscheit-Berg. “The ministry of the interior had no budget for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. They hadn’t even thought about it. I can tell you that if it were led by someone from East Germany, there’s no way something like this would have been overlooked.”

For Domscheit-Berg, examples can be seen across the board. From the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the German Embassy in Mongolia (the GDR had a representation long before), to the choice of bands in an 80’s music festival. “Guess where all the bands came from? It’s as if the music from East Germany had been eliminated from memory, and this makes me feel like a 2nd rate citizen. We had some good things in the GDR. Much more gender equality, good education. Why has that been forgotten?”

There was also a representation-related controversy when Federal Research Minister, Anja Karliczek, decided to grant a 500-million-euro battery cell research factory project to Münster, a city in North Rhine-Westphalia. Minister-president of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Manuela Schwesig, criticized the decision, stating that Federal Minister Karlizcek, who comes from the Westphalian town of Ibbenbüren, had to look beyond her constituency. “There are areas in the East where projects like this one could go,” says Domscheit-Berg. “Why doesn’t it happen?”

Ambivalences IV: Escaping the GDR and making new friends

In the film Goodbye Lenin, a family in East Berlin watches the parade of the GDR’s 40th anniversary on TV. The mother, Christiane, who despite being a member of the SED, has no qualms in criticizing all the things that could be improved. Her son, Alex, is skeptical and is longing for change. The tanks are passing by outside and everything is rattling in the room. While ironing a skirt, Christiane says to her son, “Nothing will change if everyone emigrates.”

While people like Gisela Kallenbach, Uwe Schwabe, Karl-Heinz Bomberg, and many more decided to stay and try to bring about reform within the GDR, millions tried or hoped to escape. The decision wasn’t easy. There were the risks of being shot or tortured, and it also led to families being split, with a mother or uncle or sibling living in the West.

“I was fifteen when I escaped in the trunk of a diplomat’s car,” says Susanne Rindt, who was born in Halle and now lives in Berlin. “My mom’s brother had escaped in ’58 or ’59. In the trunk I was together with my mom. Dad and my sister would come later. This was 1983.” Rindt’s father was a biologist and worked at Halle University, while her mother worked at the East German Academy of Science doing lab work. The Helsinki Accords offered the human right for family reunification, and Rindt’s family applied to be reunited with Susanne’s uncle. The application was dismissed, twice, and Rindt’s father lost his job as a consequence. “He was told he was a bad influence for students at the university, then he was laid off.” He was able to make a living one way or another, making pottery and selling it here and there. “My parents were unhappy,” Rindt says. “They felt locked in, and they were worried that my sister and I wouldn’t be able to do our baccalaureate because we were a family close to the church. They made the decision thinking about our future, but also theirs.”

When the trunk opened, Susanne and her mother were in West Berlin. They went to a cafe on Kurfürstendamm (Kudamm) and met her uncle. “There was so much to take in. I didn’t cry or scream with joy. It was like all my emotions were suddenly hidden inside. Suppressed somehow.” While in the trunk, Susanne had heard a language she didn’t recognize but later learned was Portuguese from Cape Verde. A sum of 100,000 Mark had to be paid by Susanne’s uncle. A couple of days later she went to Kudamm with her aunt who thought it would be a good idea to buy her some clothes. “There were so many options of everything. I was so overwhelmed I started to cry. I couldn’t stop. This is when the emotions came back. I realized I had lost all my past: my friends, my house, my city. I had a feeling of being lost in a new world.”

In 1987 Dietmar Schultke was thinking of ways to escape when he received a letter summoning him to become a border soldier. A few weeks later he was sitting in front of an officer learning about military rules.

“There were 7 levels of trust. I got the one before the lowest.” He was stationed on the Brocken Mountains in the Harz region, and still toyed with the idea of escaping but felt bad for the consequences his comrade would suffer. They were also surveilled and spied on. “Every 10th soldier was a Stasi informer.” Frustration grew and one day he left his riffle in the woods, a grave penalty for which he was degraded near the end of his service in 1988. He was confined to patrol the barracks. After the Wall fell he moved to West Germany in February of 1990 and applied for citizenship, which he received after only 4 weeks. Since 2017 he’s been Historical Education Officer in the Dahme-Spreewald district and has written two books about his experiences in the GDR. Like him, many Ossies who moved to the West in the 90’s have now returned. “I think we miss a feeling of solidarity, which is something we developed in the GDR. It was necessary you might say, but it was there. It is much harder to find in the West.”

On the 14th of November 1989, Bernd Meyer crossed the border into East Germany with his camera for the first time since 1952, when West Berliners were banned from entering the GDR. He and his wife, Gisela, had lived for decades in the district of Lichterfelde wary of the barbed wire, the watchtower and the dogs only a few meters away from their home. “In November of 1989 I knew we were living a historic moment,” says Meyer. “That’s why I brought my camera and filmed the first instants of reunification.” He kept going back to film all that was happening and the GDR guards became curious. They asked him what he was up to, and whether they could see the result. “They came and sat in this very living room. Four border soldiers. They had coffee and watched the video I had made. The same soldiers we had been afraid of just weeks back were now in our house. Two of them kept coming back to our house. That’s how the wall fell for us.”

Looking into the future

It would be hard to argue that the open market economy model works equally for everyone in society. GDP per capita and life expectancy have increased, especially in metropolitan areas, but one only needs to look at cities like San Francisco, Portland, Paris, Brussels, to see the number of people living on the streets. The wealth generated after the fall of the Iron Curtain has not been shared fairly. Differences between rich and poor continue to grow, and the disempowered look for ways to express their discontent. Populist and far-right movements claim they can offer a solution to those who feel neglected. But is it a real solution? “The AfD knows very well that there are two Germanies,” says Franco DelleDonne, PhD in Political Communication from Freie Universität Berlin. “They are experts in capitalizing the discontent that has brewed in the country for several reasons after reunification. But do they have a solid platform to address climate change? The challenges that Germany and Europe will face in the years to come? It would be wise to ask these questions to them.”

The benefits and costs of reunification have been shared across German society. Some, however, bore a higher cost than others. Those born in the 50’s in East Germany were more than half-way into their productive life when they had to readjust to a new way of living. Their pensions suffered due to the unemployment years they went through towards the end of their careers. Younger generations were able to learn and readjust, but scars in the social fabric were inevitable. Thirty years have passed leaving painful lessons that ought to be talked about and learned from. They need to be acknowledged to be able to move on as a unified nation.

“I learned to give importance to self-development, which you can say is a form of egoism,” says Bomberg. “But I also know that once I have developed myself, I can give back to the community and improve society. It’s a balance. And that’s what I’ve learned through these years.”

This article was commissioned by the Goethe-Institut

All the way to Saty, a village located south east of Almaty, strings of horses appeared left and right of the road, often scattered like insects on the backs of the hills. They grazed in peace, shook their tails and pricked their ears in alert, a spasm sometimes running across their flanks.

In the fall I traveled to the Almaty Region in Kazakhstan to explore some of its natural treasures, learn more about its nomadic ancient traditions. The horizon was clear and expansive, only the velvety plains and the ragged surface of the mountains were constant companions. I felt as if I had landed on a friendly asteroid or a verdant planet in a distant galaxy.

Saty is one of the first villages in Kazakhstan to adopt the model of Community Based Tourism (CBT), in which the village families join efforts with tour operators to offer food and board, entertainment, arts and crafts workshops, all of it conducted by the local community. It’s a way to get everyone involved and develop a sense of belonging and caring for their place of origin. The Kazakh government has invested in the improvement and extension of the highways and roads so that convenient access from cities such as Almaty can bring not only tourism to the region, but also goods and services.

Inside a yurt, the traditional nomadic home of the Kazakh nomadic people, I enjoyed typical songs performed by a music teacher from the local school who played the dombra, a traditional string instrument, as well as a dance by young girls and boys. One thing that caught my attention about the yurt was the center of the ceiling which has a circular shape and is called Shanerak. It is, symbolically, the most important part of the dwelling and its shape means union. Union of the family but also of the nation. A family-size yurt can be disassembled in about 2 hours by people familiar with its structure, which has a weight of approximately 350 kilos. The yurt can be transported on the back of either one camel or a couple of strong horses.

It is believed that the horse was originally domesticated by the Scythians, a group of peoples living in this area of Central Asia as far back as the 11th century BC. The Scythians were so deft at horse riding that some scholars have entertained the possibility that the myth of the Centaur, created by the Greeks, found its origin in this part of the world.

At the table I tried the manties (dumplings filled with vegetables or spiced meat), as well as tomato and cucumber salad. There was also Kurt, which is made from dried salty cheese and has a very sour taste. Several kinds of sweets we offered for dessert including irimshik and zhent which are sweets made with a mix of millet flour, curd and sugar.

After dinner, when everyone had gone to bed, I went for a walk near the compound where the cabins stood, and even if the cold air gave me a runny nose, I stopped for a moment under the moonlight and filled my lungs with the smells of the night, a blanket of peace falling over me. Only the murmur of the Chilik river could be heard.

On the voyage I encountered landscapes of sheer dramatic beauty. The turquoise waters of the Kaindy lake with its solitary trees standing like frozen sentinels draw an image I will never forget. Formed after an earthquake in 1887 which destroyed a natural-formed dam upstream, the lake holds a snapshot of nineteenth century Kazakhstan: the trunks of the trees still standing in the middle of the lake’s waters date from a time when the Russian Empire still lay claim to these lands.

Not far from Kaindy, one can also visit the Kolsai lakes. Found only a few kilometers from the border with Kyrgyzstan, the three Kolsai lakes are at altitudes of 1700, 2500 and 2800 meters respectively. One can reach the first one by car and from there, hiking to the second lake would take about two and a half hours. A final stretch of two hours would be needed to reach the final one. Horses for rent are also available on site during the high season.

To reach Saty and the lakes, travelers can either rent a car in the city of Almaty or contact a tour operator. At this time, bus transport services are still being planned and developed. To Almaty I flew via Istanbul where I was able to see the brand new airport. “It’s a city within a city,” told me a flight attendant when I asked her about it. The ceilings are high and stylized, and they look like the inner skeleton of a futuristic beast. During my couple of hours layover, I saw droves of people walking by, shopping for souvenirs, slurping soda, and in the maelstrom of so many passengers plenty had difficulty finding a seat. But despite its monumental size, the place was kept impeccable by the cleaning services team.

On the drive back to the city of Almaty I saw shepherds on horses looking after their sheep. On the face of the hills, they seemed like tiny fluffs of cotton pinned to the surface. Not far from them attentive dogs barked. They ran back and forth like short-tempered foremen. Far away into the distance I saw the silhouette of two solitary horses, and I wondered why they were so isolated from any other string of horses. After a moment I saw one of them raise its front legs and mount the other one. They had become a single shape.

The largest city in the country, Almaty is nevertheless full of trees and green areas. Because Almaty lies at the foot of the mountains, several streams run through the city — the melted snow feeds the Bolshaya Almatinka, Malaya Almatinka and Esentai rivers. There is a legend stating that in the 19th century, men could only get married after having planted a dozen trees. Not for nothing is Almaty also referred to as the Garden City.

On a day trip from Almaty, I visited a Kazakh Ethno Village called The Huns where I was able to know more about the nomadic traditions. I saw horse riders, both men and women, demonstrate acrobatic tricks and traditions. For instance there is Kyz Kuu, or “Girl chasing”, a game where the horseman can either steal a kiss or get a whipping from the horsewoman.

There are also simulated man to man fights while they ride their horses. Travelers can visit the Ethno Village for half a day or spend the night. There are yurtages (yurt + cottage) for those wanting additional comfort, and guests can choose to go on a horseback riding tour, relax in the steam room, follow masterclasses on “how to be a nomad”, or simply wander around and enjoy the sweet fragrance from the apple tree orchards. The juicy Aport, which is a mix of Russian and Kazakh varieties, grows in these fields.

Also on the outskirts of city, I visited a falconry where I learned about the Golden Eagle and why it is the national symbol of Kazakhstan. Nomadic tribes saw the need to protect their herds from the attacks of wolves and thus began taming and training eagles. Young eagles would be trained to hunt wolves by the neck or at least deter them from getting near the livestock. For centuries the tradition has passed on and thus the eagle symbolizes the nomadic culture of the country.

On the last day, I visited the Green Bazar (Bereke), which sits close to the intersection of Pushkin Street and Zhibek Zholy Avenue. Inside I tried dried apricots and figs and different nuts offered by chatty sellers, many of them Uzbek or Tajik, whose hands are always full of dried fruits for every passerby.

One can find pickled vegetables (carrot, peppers, cucumbers) as well as honey and many different kinds of dairy products, including the famous kumis or fermented horse milk. Before leaving I glanced one last time at the stands full of fresh fruits and vegetables all of them streaked by the mid-morning sunlight and I took with me the sounds, the smells, hoping to be back again in Almaty.

That particular passage came back to me last Sunday at the Laeken cemetery in Brussels, when I joined a group of over 20 people for a guided tour of the premises. The sky was clear, the heat intense, and I was surprised to see two children in the group, a boy and a girl of about ten years of age, both completely dressed in white. They stood in the shade with their mother, eager perhaps to visit the cemetery that is known as the Père Lachaise of Brussels. I wondered what was going through the minds of those children, what they made of all the graves that lay ahead of us. They were attentive to what our guide, Philippe Bacquet began to say at the entrance of the cemetery.

“This is the oldest cemetery in the Brussels Region,” he said. “The last one also to exist next to the church, Notre Dame de Laeken, where the first Queen of Belgium, Louise-Marie d’Orleans is buried. Her body is in the royal crypt over there.”

In 1784, during the Habsburg period, Emperor Joseph II issued a decree stating the cemeteries could no longer exist next to the church, as they once had. They had to be placed outside of the city for reasons of hygiene. In 1804, during the Napoleonic years, the management of the cemeteries was handed to the municipalities instead of the parishes. Many parcels were granted in perpetuity, mainly to nobles or people of means.

We stop to admire the funerary monument to Emile Bockstael, mayor of Laeken for 43 years. He was the mastermind behind the funerary galleries at both, the Molenbeek-Saint Jean cemetery, and the one in Laeken. There is a street and a metro station named after him.

The next one was the monument dedicated to architect Joseph Poelaert, designer of the Palace of Justice, the Congress Column, the restoration of the Monnaie Opera building, and many more. “Poelaert was very clever,” said Mr. Bacquet. “When the competition for the Palace of Justice took place, Poelaert was in the jury. Of course none of the projects made it to the desk of the Minister of Justice. Poelaert went up to him and said, ‘I want to show you something. This is what I have in mind for the building. I’ve been working on it for ten years.’ And that was all he had to say.”

We then descended to the funerary galleries with their long and empty corridors, the air much cooler, it gives the impression of being in a mortuary chamber where bodies have been led into a cryogenic process. “It took five year to restore these galleries,” said Mr. Bacquet. “There was water infiltration everywhere. It cost 4,5 million Euros to repair all of this.”

Outside again we saw long lines of tombstones, all identical, almost no space in between them. Unknown soldiers from the First World War, is what Mr. Bacquet explained. We walked on for a few minutes, the burnt yellow grass crackling under our feet like eggshells. Tiny red insects scurried away and hid behind rocks.

The tomb of Marie Popelin has the image of a woman on it and an inscription from the Belgian League for Women’s Rights. For a moment we stood watching it while the participants regrouped. “She was the first woman to receive her law diploma in Belgium. In all her right she was a lawyer. But she was never allowed to work as one.” There was silence. “It is an interesting contrast, what has happened in our society,” Mr. Bacquet continued. “Because today there are more female lawyers than male ones.”

Facing the Dreve de St. Anne sits the massive statue by Auguste Rodin, The Thinker. Over time it has become greenish with rust but the spectacular display of craftsmanship knowledge of human anatomy remains intact. After the Franco-Prussian war, Rodin came to Brussels in 1871 and stayed on until 1877. He worked under the tutelage of sculptor Albert Carrier-Belleuse on the decoration of La Bourse, in the center of town, among other projects. “Carrier-Belleuse wasn’t very kind with his student. He forbid him to sign his sculptures. He was probably jealous, but great art always comes to the light.” It was thanks to Josef Dillen, the art historian, who in 1928 made a list with all the pieces that Rodin had sculpted during his stay in Brussels.

Some of the tombs are well cared for, clean and with flowers, others show signs of decay, large sections of moss growing on them like a shadow. Others show the person’s name and the date of birth, but no date of passing away. “These tombs are ready for use,” said Mr. Bacquet. “The family is probably just waiting.” I glanced at the boy and the girl, but they seemed distracted. Perhaps they did not want to know what was being inferred by those words.

The last tomb we stopped to look at was that of Spanish singer, María de la Felicidad García, also known as La Malibran. Her talent was discovered early and she performed in public for the first time at the age of six in Naples. Her father was strict and repressive. To spite him, she married a man by the last name of Malibran, a gambler. Years later she divorced him and married the well known violinist Charles de Beriot. “Have you seen the Municipality building in Ixelles, the one at Fernand Cocq square? Well that’s where they both lived.” The funerary monument shows a statue of La Malibran performing Norma, which was made by Belgian sculptor Joseph Geefs.

A bell rang and we were invited to head back to the exit. “Over there, at the end of this alley, lies the tomb of symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff,” said Mr. Bacquet. “Another reason for you to come back.”

In the end I was able to trace it back to an old movie, Warriors, an American film about street gangs in the New York of the late seventies, early eighties. One of my older brothers, a fan of crime action films, found it at the video rental store and brought it home. I must have been four or five, and we played it on the old Betamax, both of us lying flat on our stomachs on the carpet of my parents’ TV room. On the screen appeared images of slow-moving underground trains where no space in the car had been left without tagging, sprayed symbols covering doors and windows, words that laid claim to a public space that belonged to everyone and no one.

I didn’t realize how little I knew about graffiti and street art until a few days ago, when I joined a guided walking tour along the canal organized by Fais Le Trottoir ASBL, an organization that fosters public awareness of the different forms of street art in Brussels. The meeting point was at the corner of Rue du Cheval Noir and Quai du Hainaut, on the west bank of the canal in Molenbeek, not far from the MIMA museum. The day was clear, the sun intense; cyclists rode by curious about what the group was up to.

“The origins of graffiti go back to ancient times, to Greece and Rome, even Egypt,” said Thyl, graffiti and street artist. “As we know it today, the emergence happened in Philadelphia and New York.” He mentioned Cornbread, which was the tagging name used by Darryl McCray, whose signature letters became emblematic in the Philadelphia street art of the 60’s and 70’s. There was also Taki 183, a Greek artist who also became known for his tags in the streets of New York. Graffiti’s and street art’s development, Thyl pointed out, were closely linked to that of Hip-Hop, Break Dance, and DJ music. “There’s a great book by Martha Cooper called Subway Art. You should really check it out.”

We walked on Rue du Cheval Noir, a narrow street in the shape of an L, and admired some of the art samples on the walls. “A throw up is the technique used when graffiti is filled in a rush,” explained Thyl. “You can see some examples here and here.” Over the years street art has created its own terminology. For instance, a TOY, the acronym for Troll Over You, is when an artist paints over the work of another, either deliberately or by ignorance of the established etiquette. An Angel is a respected artist who has passed away. Admirers tag their names on a wall with halos above them. One can get a glimpse of what it was like to live in the New York of the 70’s, the grim atmosphere of the underground world, in Don Delillo’s masterful story The Angel Esmeralda.

A core element of graffiti and street art is the notion of illegality. “In Brussels you can say the attitude towards street art is more or less relaxed,” said Thyl. “The fines can go from 150 to 750 Eur per tag. In Liege it’s harsher. You risk going to a court hearing from the very first time.” Arno2bal (farm-prod), another street artist and urban illustrator, commented that it’s perhaps this laissez-faire attitude that attracts so many artists from other parts of Europe. “In the summer months many of them take the train, spend a couple of months here with several like-minded people. They get a lot out of the experience.”

On the walls right next to the canal we see some of the fresques, or street art creations that have been commissioned by public authorities. In a fresque the idea of illegality is absent. We walked in the direction of Porte de Ninove and the conversation inevitably shifted to the works of Vincent Glowinski, also known as Bonom, whose street art creations both shocked and marveled the people of Brussels. “For some of his creations, the really large ones, he had to descend with a rope in what is called a Rappel technique. He was able to use both, right and left hands. Needless to say he’s really talented.” Bonom’s reputation grew large in part thanks to the erotic images that began to appear in Brussels between 2005 and 2010.

After having faced charges in 2010, Glowinski decided to turn the page and leave the story of Bonom behind. “Now he is using a technique called ‘the human brush’. His movements are recorded by a special camera, then shown to the public. All kinds of unusual shapes can be seen.”

To finish the visit we walked on Boulevard de l’Abattoir towards the South Train Station. On Rue Moretus we stopped to admire a large creation by Sozyone Gonzalez, a Belgian artist who along with Smimooz Exel founded De Puta Madre, one of the most successful hip-hop bands in Belgium. Sozyone has since then made Valencia his home but Brussels’ streets still hold dear memories of him.

Returning to the city after these years the first thing that stuck me was the icy blade of silence. No cars were visible, not for a long while, and the ones I saw seemed to glide past squares and roundabouts before disappearing into distance. No sound. I had never seen so many electric cars in a neighborhood, let alone a city. I wondered if that was one of the indicators that had led to Oslo winning the 2019 European Green Capital Award.

The European Green Capital Award, I discovered, is the result of an initiative taken by 15 European cities (Tallinn, Helsinki, Riga, Vilnius, Berlin, Warsaw, Madrid, Ljubljana, Prague, Vienna, Kiel, Kotka, Dartford, Tartu & Glasgow) and the Association of Estonian cities on 15 May 2006 in Tallinn, Estonia. Their green vision became a joint Memorandum of Understanding that rewards the cities leading the way on environmentally friendly urban living. The European Green Capital Award was launched by the European Commission in 2008.

The objectives of the European Green Capital Award are to:

• Reward cities that have a consistent record of achieving high environmental standards
• Encourage cities to commit to on‐going and ambitious goals for further environmental improvement and sustainable development
• Provide a role model to inspire other cities and promote best practice and experiences in all other European cities

To select the winner of the European Green Capital Award, an Expert Panel conducts a technical assessment of the applications received.

The evaluation of each city’s application is based on 12 environmental indicators:

1. Climate Change: Mitigation and Adaptation
2. Local Transport
3. Green Urban Areas incorporating Sustainable Land Use
4. Nature and Biodiversity
5. Ambient Air Quality
6. Quality of the Acoustic Environment
7. Waste Production and Management
8. Water Management
9. Waste Water Management
10. Eco‐innovation and Sustainable Employment
11. Energy Performance
12. Integrated Environmental Management

A shortlist of candidate cities is then made and each finalist is asked to present a communication strategy substantiated by action plans on how they intend to fulfill their green capital year if they were to win. For 2019, the shortlisted cities were Oslo (Norway), Lahti (Finland), Ghent (Belgium), Lisbon (Portugal), and Tallin (Estonia).

For the Green Capital Award, the jury’s decision is based on three points:

1. The city’s overall commitment, vision and enthusiasm as conveyed through the presentation

2. The city’s capacity to act as a role model, inspiring other cities, promoting best practices and raising the awareness of the EGC model further, bearing in mind city size and location

3. The city’s communication strategy and actions, which should address:

• Citizen communication and involvement to date in relation to the 12 environmental indicators, effectiveness via changes in citizen behavior, lessons learned and proposed modifications for the future
• The extent of the city’s (local, regional and national) partnering to gain maximum social and economic leverage
• How they intend to fulfill their role of EU Ambassador, inspiring other cities.

On the plane from Brussels to Oslo, I spoke with the person seated next to me, a Norwegian pharmacist who lived in the municipality of Asker, about 20 miles southeast of the capital. I mentioned the Green Capital Award and asked her what changes she had noticed in Oslo that could have an impact on the environment.

“I’ve noticed a lot of open public spaces where people can walk, ride a bicycle, run or just lay on the grass. It’s become very convenient to be in the city without a car,” she said.

Oslo has ambitious climate targets. The city wants to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2020 (in relation to 1990), and by 95% in 2030. Polls have shown that the population supports such initiatives. Three out of four inhabitants support the overall goal. The municipality wants to offer an emission-free transport system and to that end, it is in the process of transforming its vehicles. More than 40% of the buses use renewable energy (biofuels, hydrogen and biogas), and it is expected that by 2025, 60% of them are fully electric. The trams and the metro already run on renewable energy.

“The city is also working on a renewable solution for the ferries,” said Mathilde Rübberdt, Communications Advisor for Visit Oslo. “The ferries that go to Nessoden, the municipality just across the fjord, will be fully electric by 2020.”

I met Mathilde for a quick coffee at the Hub Clarion Hotel in downtown Oslo. She briefed me on all the exciting changes that are happening in the city such as the boom of urban farming in all its forms. “If you have the chance you should visit the Losæter Urban Farm. It’s not far from here. They’re doing a lot of interesting things for adults and children alike. And there’s even a bake house!”

In the lounge we sat and delighted in the sunlight pouring in through the large windows. The day was clear and dry, the endless Nordic blue sky as crisp as the cry of a bird. The leather seat of my chair creaked as I bent forward to tell her about the signs I had seen at my hotel, Scandic Vulcan, indicating there were beehives on the rooftop. “Yes, all of that is happening in the city more and more. And in this very hotel, there is garden on the rooftop where they grow vegetables. In the basement grow herbs.”

Oslo has a population of nearly 660,000 inhabitants. It is surrounded by the nationally protected Marka Forest, which gives people the possibility to be in close contact with nature. “We Norwegians love to on hikes in East and Nordmarka. It’s like a breath of fresh air within very easy reach,” said Lene, guide for the Oslo Guidebureau. “But it also means the city cannot expand, and that of course brings about challenges to city planners who have to make the most of each centimeter of space.”

In 2017 approximately 350 parking spots were removed. The idea was to create space for other activities. The same dynamic continued all through 2018 and in total nearly 700 street parking spots for private cars were removed.

Oslo has become the ‘Electric Vehicle Capital of the World’ with 30% of all new cars sold in Oslo being electric vehicles (EV) or plug-in hybrids, which can be explained by the incentives offered by both, local and national authorities, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The positive shift in behavior, however, has brought about some undesired side effects.

“Electric cars can ride in the same lane as the bus and in the morning there are so many electric cars that you can’t really be sure to arrive on time at work if you catch the bus,” said Lene. Some people have complained that the incentives are not fair because most electric-car owners also have a petrol-fueled car for longer distances. “There is feeling, at least among a segment of the population, that only the rich ones are benefiting,” Lene went on. “The incentives will start do wind down, but the important thing is that many people have already changed their behavior. They use their cars a lot less.”

Looking at the Technical Assessment Report for the shortlisted cities, the ranking shows that Oslo scored 1 or 2 for nearly all of the 12 environmental indicators, something which is remarkable. The only two areas where the city scored low were: Waste Water Management, and Water Management.

Almost the entire population of Oslo is connected to the collecting system and to two Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs). The reason for the low score was that the total load received by the WWTPs of 79,000 PE, as recorded in 2015, was much lower than the total generated wastewater of the city, which was 792,000 PE. Oslo’s application did not explain how the city managed the wastewater not received by the WWTPs. Note: A PE or Population Equivalent in waste-water treatment is the number expressing the ratio of the sum of the pollution load produced during 24 hours by industrial facilities and services to the individual pollution load in household sewage produced by one person in the same time.

As for Water Management, the report mentioned that due to the availability of large quantities of high quality surface water, urban consumption and distribution losses are quite high. It noted, however, that bathing water quality of local water bodies is good, and that the ecological status of streams and rivers is healthy.

One morning I went jogging along the Akers river, as I used to do in the past, from Grünerløkka and up to Nydalen. In the parks I saw dogs chasing each other in circles, families of ducks dipping their orange feet in the water, women with sunglasses pushing prams and smiling at the sun. At the top of a hill, not far from BI University, I stopped to catch my breath. I stood there for a moment, smelling the scent of pines and firs, and all I could hear was the murmur of the river.

As in thousands of homes in Portugal, the tradition of Pão de Ló has been kept through family customs, generation after generation, everyday moments that are stored in memory. Made with three basic ingredients — eggs, flour and sugar — Pão de Ló de Margarine has a history that dates back to the 18th century when a woman named Clara María finds the ideal combination and makes what would become the now famous Pão de Ló, which can be translated as sponge cake. “This bread immediately gained notoriety because it could last for up to two or three weeks without expiring,” explains Cláudio Ferreira, general director of the Felgueiras Business Association. “It is believed that Clara María was inspired by a recipe she heard of in a convent.”

The house where Clara María lived can be found in Margaride, one of the freguesías or neighborhoods of the municipality of Felgueiras, also the seat of the town hall or cámara do concelho. The center of Margaride has many trees and cobbled streets; bakeries fill the air with the sweet aroma from their ovens. Before her death, Clara María made sure that her legacy continued through her employees, Antónia Félix and Leonor Rosa da Silva. It was the latter who pushed the production of Pão de Ló to even higher levels. As a result of the fifty years of Leonor Rosa’s unrelenting efforts, the Pão de Ló de Margaride goes beyond Felgueiras and extends throughout the country, even reaching Brazil. On December 5, 1888, a letter with the shields of the Dukes of Braganza and signed by the count of São Mamede gives Leonor Rosa’s bakery the title of Royal Supplier.

“In 1900, two years after the death of Leonor Rosa, this factory was inaugurated,” explains Guilherme Lickfold, current director of the factory, and descendant of Leonor Rosa da Silva’s third husband, Joaquim Luiz da Silva. The building is located in the Republic Square, in the center of Margaride. “In these two ovens the loaves are placed for more or less 45 minutes. The most common sizes are 500 grams, 1 kilo, and 1 kilo and a half, although there may be larger.” The baking time can vary depending on the size of the bread and the consistency desired. The longer in the oven, the drier the bread. And the drier, the longer it can be preserved.

One of the fundamental elements of the Pão de Ló de Margaride is the use of fresh eggs. For each kilo of baked bread, 22 egg yolks are required. “Here in Felgueiras, only fresh eggs are used,” explains Cláudio Ferreira. “There is Pão de Ló in other areas of Portugal but the tradition is not the same. The yolks, for example, are pasteurized. They are not fresh. And that makes a big difference in taste. ”

To safeguard this rich tradition, the Felgueiras Business Association has begun the process to obtain Protected Geographical Identification (PGI). In addition to ensuring the quality of the production methods of the Pão de Ló, this identification would allow producers to have greater reach and visibility internationally. “If someone sees the PGI label, they know it is a quality product,” says Cláudio Ferreira. “The customer immediately knows that it is a real Pão de Ló de Margaride.”

One of the challenges for the export of the Pão de Ló is the time needed for transport and distribution. Another objective of the PGI certification would be the possibility to submit the breads to an ultra-freezing process, which would extend the life of the product for up to two months. The investment required to obtain the PGI amounts to 240,000 euros.

At the top of one of the hills in Margaride stands the parish of Santa Quitéria where every June 29th, the day of the feast of São Pedro, the Courtship of the Flowers takes place. Women dressed in traditional costumes carry baskets full of flowers on their heads, advance in procession singing and dancing in honor of the saint who was, the legend explains, beheaded in the second century for having maintained their faith. This year the parish of Santa Quitéria celebrated its 300th anniversary.

On the main square of Margaride, men sit on the terraces drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette; women stand under the shade of ash trees chatting and fanning their faces. Shoe stores abound on nearly every street, as well as stands with kiwis and asparagus, all of them an important part of the economy in the region. Children walk hand in hand with their parents eating cavacas: cookies made with the same dough as Pão de Ló.

“If you want a slightly different flavor, try the cavaquinhas da serra,” explains José Mario Sousa, manager of Casa Rosa Sousa. “The sweet taste of Pão de Ló combines very well with the salty taste of sheep cheese.” Founded in 1974 by José Mario’s mother, Rosa Sousa, the factory has been characterized by its creative and innovative spirit in transforming traditional products to offer new and different flavors. This innovative attitude has already been recognized on several occasions, including the prize for the best Abade de Priscos pudding in 2014. This pudding is characterized by having, in addition to the caramelized flavor, a light aroma of bacon. “In 2014 my mother won in the category for companies, and I in the individual category. And that was really the takeoff for our family business. Now many more people know about Casa Rosa Sousa.”

In the Rosa Sousa store you can find four different flavors of pudding(coffee, orange, ovos molos and Abade de Priscos), the patented cavaquinhas da serra, Pão de Ló de Margaride with chocolate flavor, Molotof pudding, cakes with kiwi jelly, among many other things.

Both the Cavacas and the Pão de Ló de Margaride are finalists for the contest of the Seven Wonders of the Sweets of Portugal.

The five bakeries that produce the Pão de Ló de Margaride are:

• Casa Rosa Sousa, Alojamento e Produtos Regionais
• Pao de Lo de Margaride Mário Ribeiro
• Casa do Pao de Ló Agostinho de Sousa
• Pao de Ló de Margaride António Lopes
• Fábrica do Pao de Ló de Margaride Leonor Rosa da Silva

The book was written by Aurelio Baldor, a prominent Cuban mathematician whose work continues to be used in schools in the Spanish-speaking world to this day. On the right hand side of the cover appears the image of a bearded man with large observant eyes and thin feline features, his red and yellow robe matching his neatly tight turban — its fabric seems to have dozens of minuscule folds. Behind him lies a city with buildings the color of sand.

On the left hand side a minaret rises, as well as a dome of what could be a mosque or a madrassah (school). It intrigued me, the image of the studious man overlooking the yellowish city on a clear day, his introspective gaze almost an invitation to ask: What problem are you trying to solve?

His name was visible on the bottom right, inscribed on a twisting parchment: Al-Juarismi. The details of his life remained obscure to me, however, and after finishing middle school I forgot all about the turbaned man, except on those occasions at the end a family get-together, usually on a Sunday, when I’d see my younger cousins dragging their feet to their desks then plump down on a chair to work on their equations.

As I enter the Ota-Darvoza Gate (Father’s Gate) of the walled city of Khiva (Ichon-Kala), in the province of Khorezm in Western Uzbekistan, I have to stop. The sky is pristine, the air dry, but even with a baseball hat and sunglasses on, the heat is pounding. The walls of the fortified town run meters and meters, and in the distance a minaret rises to the sky. Behind a large map of the town, I find the statue of man sitting on a bench, leaning to the side over a manuscript, his face deep in thought.

“That’s Al-Khwarizmi,” a young woman with a badge hanging from her neck says to me. “Did you know that the word algorithm is derived from his name?” I assume she’s a tour guide and welcome the information she’s offering. She explains that his name was Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a scholar born in this region around 780 CE. In one of his treatises, The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, he postulated a solution of linear and quadratic equations. “He was an astronomer and geographer, a respected man who moved to the court in Baghdad,” she says. “Many believe he’s the founder of algebra.”

After she’s left I stand there for a moment. Under the heat I look at the concentrated look on his face, the folds on his turban sculpted in bronze. Leaning over the manuscript, a hand on his chin, he seems to be wrestling with a long-standing mathematical enemy. For a moment I imagine all the intellectual activity that must have occurred in this town centuries back, the thinkers and philosophers that lived and studied here, their desire to understand the world. Besides Al-Khwarizmi, the great mathematician Al-Biruni and the physician Ibn-Sina (Avicenna) studied in Khorezm at the Mamun Academy, named after the two brothers, Hassan and Abbas, who organized assemblies in the XI century to foster the exchange of ideas.

By Davide Mauro — Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

My stay in Khiva was short but I was able to get a feel for the place. At the start of the 20th century there were 65 madrassahs in Khiva, 54 of them within the Ichon-Kala. The Khanate of Khiva lasted until 1920 when the last Khan, Abdullah Khan, abdicated and the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic was created. This republic lasted until 1923, when the short-lived Khorezm Socialist Soviet Republic (SSR) came into being on October 20th. Seven days later, part of Khorezm was integrated into the Uzbek SSR, while the rest became part of the Autonomous Karakalpak Region and the Turkmen SSR.

Due to its well preserved monuments and buildings, the Ichon-Kala of Khiva was included in the list of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage in 1990. There are 51 ancient monumental structures and nearly 250 preserved dwellings including the madrasahs of Alla-Kulli-Khan, Muhammad Aminkhon, Muhammad Rakhimkhon, the Mausoleums of Pahlavon Mahmoud, Sayid Allavuddin, Shergozikhon as well as several caravanserays.

From Tashkent one can get to Khiva either flying to Urgench, a city located 40 km west of Khiva, or by train. Train tickets cost anything between 18 to 36 euros, and the trip takes 11 hours with one change in Bukhara.

I spend the afternoon getting lost in the web of narrow streets and alleyways, speaking with merchants and craftswomen. All over Khiva I see dozens and dozens of Chugirmachiliks, the fur hats typical of the Khorezm region. It is supposed to keep the head cool in hot summer days, and warm in cold days. Dozens of patterned silk scarfs hang in the wind next to embroidered tablecloths and bed covers. Colorful plates and teapots lie in the sun.

Traditional woodcarving has an old and rich history here, and some of the most beautiful examples of it can be seen inside the Juma Mosque (Friday Mosque), perhaps my favorite place in Khiva. The mosque has an inner courtyard with a handful of benches around it. After showing my ticket at the door a feeling of peace washed over me. I stood there for a moment watching a thin veil of light pouring in at an angle and illuminating the floor. Only the murmur of a tour guide speaking to a couple can be heard. Lines and lines of wooden columns — 213 in total — give a feeling of depth and perspective all around. Called karagacha, the elm columns have delicate sinuous patterns carved on them. Only four of the original karagacha remain.

Before sunset I decided to climb the 120 steps to the top of the Islam Khoja Minaret, built in 1910 and nearly 60 meters tall. It is a narrow staircase and the steps seem to have been made for giants — they are very high — but the 360 degree view of the town is well worth the effort.

As for the local food, I tasted the Shivit Oshi or dill-infused noodles. The melons from Khorezm, in all its varieties (Gurvak, Kari Kiz, Bol Kovun) are juicy and fragrant, while the pears, which are as tiny as a hummingbird, seem to flap their sweet wings of flavor in your mouth.

During the trip I had the chance to meet David Hoffmann, an extraordinary food vlogger from Miami, adventurous and full of energy, with whom I shared a plates of rice pilaf, roasted peppers and marinated lamb. Seated at the table, we raised our glasses of vodka and toasted to the scents and flavors of Uzbek hospitality.

During his second trip, in July of 1959, he visited Brussels. The journey began in Naples and went on to include destinations such as Pompeii, Paestum, Rome, Tarquinia, Venice, Florence, Chartres, Lascaux, Paris, among many others. I became aware of all this last month, when I visited the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Kunst Historisches Museum in Vienna, which showed a selection of works spanning his whole artistic career. From the early, figurative paintings of the 1930’s and 40’s, to his more reflective and abstract canvases of the late 50’s and 60’s. Rothko’s children, Kate and Christopher, were closely involved in the exhibition’s design and some of the paintings were on loan from their own private collections.

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien on Instagram: "@madamefaction visited ‚Mark Rothko' and shared a blogpost about her impressions. ✨ To read it, follow the link in our Instagram Stories..."

At the end of a long hallway, where three of Rothko’s paintings from the late 1940’s were exhibited, I saw a large reproduction of the Queen Elizabeth’s logbook on the wall. Queen Elizabeth was the name of the ship on which Rothko had returned to the United States after his 1959 trip to Europe. “Names and descriptions of alien passengers embarked at the port of Southampton,” appeared at the top. The date of departure was 20th of August, 1959, and the destination New York. With ticket number C.60073, the name of Mark Rothko is typed in capital letters, followed by those of his wife Mell and daughter Kate, all of them reported as being “In Transit from Brussels.” The line intrigued me. Why in transit? I had never known that Rothko had spent time in Brussels. What had he seen and done during his stay?

The journey started on June 15th, 1959, when the family sailed, tourist class, on the USS Independence, which seven days later called in at the port of Naples. Rothko had been counting the days to pack his suitcase and leave on vacation. The year before, 1958, he had been working on one of the most important series of paintings ever commissioned to him, The Seagram Murals, which were destined for the restaurant of the Four Seasons hotel. The building had been designed by Philip Johnson and Mies van de Rohe, two of the most renowned architects of the time. Rothko eventually refused to bring the project to completion and broke his part of deal — he gave back the advance in a fit of disgust stating, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”

Mark Rothko on Instagram: "Seagram Mural End Panel, 1959 by #MarkRothko #Rothko"

At the Kunst Historisches Museum I was able to see one of the Seagram Murals, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, as well as several of the mural sketches he painted during the preparation period for the commission. Many scholars believe that the style that came to characterize Rothko’s late paintings, including the Seagram Murals, was deeply marked by something that Rothko saw during his first trip to Florence in 1950: Michaelangelo’s Laurentian Library.

Early in his career Rothko had been fascinated by Greek myths, the construction of temples, the origins of European art. At the Metropolitan and at the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA) in New York he sat for hours studying Rembrandt, Vermeer, Miro, Matisse, all of them revered by the native of Daugavpils. The soft brush strokes, the ephemeral vanishing light so characteristic of his canvases are reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard’s work, which Rothko is known to have seen in 1948 at the MoMa. At the Kunst Historisches Museum some of the paintings reveal the undeniable influences, the colors, the motives and the exploration of techniques.

His attitude towards European art changed, however, as attested by what his close friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz, recalled when describing the painter’s “vehemence about the European scene, his flat rejection of it.” This was the mid 1950’s. Stanley Kunitz, who wrote poetry until he was a hundred, was also Jewish and knew Rothko well. Life seemed to have joined the paths of these two talented yet darkened-by-tragedy souls: both of them had grown up without a father — Kunitz’s had killed himself six weeks before Stanley was born, while Rothko’s had died of colon cancer when Rothko was only 10. By the time Rothko boarded the USS Independence in 1959 they had become so close that Kunitz was listed as one of the beneficiaries in Rothko’s will — the others were Rothko’s two brothers, his sister Sonia, Mell’s two sisters, and the sculptor Herbert Ferber.

Mark Rothko on Instagram: "Mark Rothko & Herbert Ferber, 1947 ©️Herbert Ferber Estate, New York #MarkRothko #Rothko #HerbertFerber #Ferber"

As time went by, Rothko’s ambivalent attitude towards European art seemed to become more intense. Kunitz recalled him saying, “We have wiped the slate clean. We start anew. A new land. We’ve got to forget what the Old Masters did.”

In Brussels, Rothko met with the Belgian painter and poet, Anne-Marie Levine, who invited him over for dinner. Levine’s father, upon meeting Rothko, suggested that he ought to see some of the great works of art the country had to offer, for instance Rubens, Brueghel, Ensor. Rothko shrugged and declared that he was “not interested in painting.”

Rather than seeing Belgian art, Rothko had a different motivation to come to Brussels: his nephew Kenneth Rabin was living there. Kenneth was Sonia Rothko’s son, who had started a career in the US Foreign Service in 1955. After serving in Canberra and Perth, he was posted to Brussels for a number of years before moving to Manila. It was thanks to the postcards that Rothko had sent to his nephew that a great part of his journey can be outlined — he sent a postcard to Kenneth from Venice indicating he expected to be in Paris on July 15th and shortly after he would leave for Brussels. I found myself wanting to know more about Kenneth Rabin, the house he had lived in, what he had told his uncle about his experience in Brussels. I contacted the Jewish museum, I emailed Anne-Marie Levine, I called the US Embassy but to no avail. All I could find out was that Mr. Rabin had died in 2006 at the age of 81 in Portland, Oregon, the city where Rothko had moved to after leaving Latvia in 1913.

The 10-year-old boy’s first experiences in America were not easy. On the train journey from New York to Oregon, he had to carry a sign around his neck that read, “I don’t speak English.” A few months later his father died. All of these events marked the artist’s view of the world, all of which can be seen in the way he chose to express his wounded sensibility on the canvas. In 1958, during a lecture at the Pratt Institute, he said that the main ingredient of his work was “a clear preoccupation with death, the intimations with mortality.” He was forever interested in the spiritual, in the tragic nature of existence which he understood to be a part of his life.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

From the second floor of the Royal Library of Belgium I can see pigeons perched on the shoulders of King Albert’s statue. On the esplanade, long-haired teenagers push off from the ground with one foot and gain speed before crouching on their skateboards for a moment, then they jump. The noise bounces off the building nearby. A group of chatty and distracted tourists follows a woman holding an unopened umbrella high in the air. I stand by one of the large windows in the periodicals section of the library with one goal in mind: find out if the Belgian press reported anything on Rothko’s 1959 visit.

Sitting in front of a table equipped with a magnifying glass and a small projector, I look at microfilmed pages of Le Soir newspaper from July of 1959. “Cyclists battle on the 46th Tour de France,” says nearly every front page. I find news of Richard Nixon’s imminent visit to Moscow, the different stages of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s trip to Belgium. I read notes about the new slats of wood and paint for the Château Malou in Woluwe Saint Lambert, a report on the shopkeeper in Liege who tried to strangle his wife, the festivities of the Belgian National Day. I read about Fidel Castro’s accession to power in Cuba and the armed conflict in Nyasaland, but nothing about Rothko. About an hour and a half later I give up thinking that either the press didn’t know about his trip or they didn’t care enough about him at the time.

What I do wind up finding in the Royal Library is the catalogue of Rothko’s exhibition at the Centre for Fine Arts (Palais des Beaux Arts) in January of 1962, the same exhibition that Rothko had gone to set up himself in 1961 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. A review article in Le Soir dated Tuesday January 9th, 1962, complains about the size of Rothko’s paintings stating that for American artists, painting those “skyscraper-like” canvases was in their genes.

The opening page of the Palais des Beaux Arts catalog acknowledges the generous support of John de Menil, the Franco-American businessman and philanthropist who a couple of years later would commission the artist’s final major project: The Rothko Chapel in Houston.

_Rothko Chapel #rothkochapel #rothko #chapel #pray #art #arte #arts #artsy #instaart #artstagram #arty #contemporaryart #artoftheday #artecontemporanea #artlover #artlovers #picoftheday #photooftheday #installation #artist #installationart #dailyart #artdaily #contemporaryartcollector #artinstallation #artwork #artgallery #houston_insta #houston

Towards the end of the 1960’s Rothko began to suffer from depression, a condition that would worsen because of his heavy drinking. On the night of April 20th, 1968, he suffered an aneurysm and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. At the emergency ward the doctors detected high blood pressure, early signs of cirrhosis. The painter had suffered a “dissecting aortic aneurysm,” they determined. The days that followed were laden with anxiety and fear. Rothko became paranoid. His poor health coupled with the mood swings caused the relationship with his wife Mell to deteriorate and on January 1st, 1969, the couple split up for good. A little over a year later, on the morning of February 25th, 1970, his body was found in a pool of blood in his 69th street studio in New York. He had taken his life.

At the Kunst Historisches Museum I sat in front of one of the Seagram Mural sketches and admired the colors for a long while. Ruby and burgundy bleeding in and out of each other. I couldn’t stop staring at it. In the silence of the room I thought of Stanley Kunitz’s poem, The Artist, which he wrote after the death of his friend:

His paintings grew darker every year.
They filled the walls, they filled the room;
eventually they filled his world –
all but the ravishment.
When voices faded, he would rush to hear
the scratched soul of Mozart
endlessly in gyre.
Back and forth, back and forth,
he paced the paint-smeared floor,
diminishing in size each time he turned,
trapped in his monumental void,
raving against his adversaries.
At last he took a knife in his hand
and slashed an exit for himself

Richard Powers — Source: Richard Powers

I have to start from the beginning. Before being blown away by the sculpted, pristine sentences found in his novel, The Echo Maker, I was enthralled by another text: Richard Powers’s recount of the trip he made to Belgium in the autumn of 2005, his research on phantom limbs and neuropsychology.

For three weeks he was a writer in residence at Passaporta House of Literature in Brussels. “I and my wife, who had never before stepped foot in the Low Countries, found ourselves in a brilliant apartment on the Oude Graanmaarkt,” he wrote. “We do not live in our muscles and joints and sinews; we live in the thought and the image and the memory of them. All this is what I came to Belgium to write about.”

I read and re-read his essay Among the Missing, my eyes following the clean strokes of a long-distance swimmer across the page, the way his thoughts cut through a whirling river of ideas. His observations, his musings, all of them had been laid on page. Then came his voice.

Richard Powers — Source: Passaporta

In early 2017, The New Yorker released a podcast where Powers read and discussed Steven Millhauser’s story, A visit, with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Tribesman. “We’ve become incredibly good at talking about people trying and failing to get a long with others,” he said. “Somehow the notion that we are also at war with or contesting the world with other creatures who don’t look like us, who don’t think like us, has been lost.” Humanity, the natural world, those are some of the themes he explores in his latest book, The Overstory.

In the context of Festival America, Powers visited Paris and Brussels in the fall of 2018, and despite a long line of commitments, he kindly agreed to continue the dialogue with me from a distance. Our conversations focused on humans and nature, trees, sustainability, changes in human consciousness, corruption, mindfulness and art.

***

Mauricio Ruiz: Of the three sources of drama: Man against man, Man against himself, Man against nature, the latter has atrophied or nearly disappeared from literature. Why is that? Does this reveal a collective attitude of apparent human control over nature?

Richard Powers: Stories about humans — both as individuals and societies — attempting to come to terms with a hostile, indifferent, or merely inscrutably different nature persist in Europe and North America into the late 19th century. Except for occasional and often nostalgic works of historical fiction, “environmental” dramas seem largely to disappear with the rise of Modernism.

The reasons are many and complex, but they come down, finally, to the foundational beliefs of Modernism itself: the belief that we have defeated “nature” and that technology now gives us unlimited dominion over all other living things on the planet. We have come to believe that we’re the only game left in town, that we can have things our own way, with no opposition. As a result, it began to seem to us that figuring out what we wanted to have and how to have it — that is, the problems of psychology and sociology — seemed to be the only interesting questions left of narrative art to address. It became rare for any novel to travel beyond those two domains and ask, again, the larger question of how human beings might live sustainably within the planetary systems that we imagined ourselves to be exempt from. Meaning became a merely subjective, invented, personal thing. Human exceptionalism, like its economic model, neoliberalism, grew entirely ascendant in public thought. There seemed to be no alternative.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve increasingly realized that, far from subduing and dominating the planet, we’ve only broken and enraged it. Living systems are coming back with a vengeance to reassert themselves in the face of our abuse. And as we’ve come to realize how insecure our existence on Earth is in fact becoming, that third kind of drama — humans struggling to accommodate a nature hostile to the desires of capitalism and humancentric individualism — is making its way back into our literary fiction. Of course, that conflict never left certain other kinds of “genre” fiction, such as science fiction. It really is only Western literary fiction, with its commitment to private and synthetic meaning, that has had to rediscover the huge truth about human existence that it has been ignoring.

MR: Elsewhere you’ve mentioned an interest in exploring what it would take to effect the transformation in consciousness that humans need, perhaps through science fiction. Could you elaborate a little bit on this transformation, and how it would happen?

RP: To see how a revolution in “tree consciousness” might come about, it helps to look at what caused prior transformations of social consciousness. The cause of abolitionism in the US was furthered at least as much by a single book — Uncle Tom’s Cabin — as it was by all the rational arguments that came before. Child labor exploitation and grotesque food industry practices disappeared, after being exposed by photography and works of popular fiction. The Civil Rights movement and the Anti-Vietnam war movement were concentrated and intensified less by facts and figures and lecturing than by movies and music and poetry and novels. Woman’s Rights, the mainstreaming of LGBT: behind each moment of enlightenment, there are works of art raising the consciousness of individual citizens.

Psychologists have demonstrated through a variety of experiments that people rarely change their mind because of logical urging or intellectual persuasion. What’s needed is an emotional catalyst, an intense affective experience that brings the experience of injustice or exploitation home. For that, an invitation to identification is necessary, a way for an individual to feel as if the drama were happening to her.

The problem is that identification is easier when the Other can be shown to resemble us. “Tree consciousness” will require an art that makes these creatures who live such alien lives on such non-human time frames seem like an essential part of our own stories. Because they are.

It’s interesting to consider that for most of human history, in most of the world’s literatures, people would not have dreamed telling stories without the non-human world at the center. In indigenous tales from every quarter of the Earth, far from being mere resources, plants and animals were essential characters that defined, oriented, and gave meaning to human existence.

MR: You mention that to be able to change someone’s mind, “What’s needed is an emotional catalyst, an intense affective experience that brings the experience of injustice or exploitation home.” In many countries artists have tried to explore the roots of corruption and nepotism, traffic of influences, hoping to make the individual feel as if the drama were happening to him/her. Yet these problems seem to have metastasized to other strata of society (kidnapping, extortion, etc.) Are artists failing? Or is there something else that is needed before we can see that change of consciousness?

RP: Art will never solve the endless ills that people manage to inflict on each other. But if art were to turn away entirely from those social ills and content itself with indulging the luxury of personal preoccupation, those social crimes of injustice and exploitation would proliferate far faster and farther than they do. Socially engaged art is definitely in the minority; perhaps if more artists were committed to a revolution in consciousness, the changes that art brings about would be even more evident. A television show, a stirring song, a book filled with brutal and indignant truth: each of those things have been known to change laws and tilt the course of history.

MR: There’s an assumption, especially among libertarians, that trees and wildlife are “just property.” Is there a way — besides a world depleted of resources — for people to acquire a different perspective/consciousness regarding the use of resources on the planet?

RP: The answer to that lies in a reexamination of the law’s approach to property and rights. One of my characters, an intellectual property lawyer, comes across a formative article that the real-life jurist Christopher Stone published back in 1972, called, “Should Trees Have Standing?” In it, Stone very presciently points out the problems with a legal system that require loss or damage to a human plaintiff before anyone can bring a suit. Shouldn’t we be able to bring a suit on behalf of a poisoned river or a gutted mountainside, even if there is no human being directly and immediately damaged by it, since we are damaged by it eventually, in the long run? If corporations and universities and ships have legal personhood, why not ecosystems?

It’s an incredibly powerful and provocative idea, one as timely now as ever. When living systems aren’t given standing and legal rights by the law, it’s an invitation to unlimited externalized costs and the kind of abusive damage that will seem as embarrassing and inconceivable to our descendants as human slavery is to us.

Environmental law in the U.S. has gone in a very different direction since Stone’s article appeared. In fact, in two years of the Trump administration, we have returned to a level of environmental abuse not permitted here for decades. But that return to the wild west can be only temporary, since it is, in fact, little more than the self-willed blindness of suicidal behavior. Meanwhile, countries such as Bolivia and New Zealand have brought Stone’s idea to reality and have implemented the idea of extending basic rights to living systems.

MR: As I read your answers two words came to my mind: Corporations and Lobbying, especially when I read passages such as, “Human exceptionalism, neoliberalism… Shouldn’t we be able to bring a suit on behalf of a poisoned river or a gutted mountainside.” The push for the accumulation of wealth seems to trample any concerns for the environment (Trump, Koch Brothers, among many). Can liberalism and capitalism and over-consumption coexist with the ideas you’ve mentioned above? If not, what is there to do? Is the battle lost?

RP: Honestly, no: an individualist, human-centric, commodity-defined culture is utterly incompatible with our continued existence on this planet. We must live subordinated to and integrated into the same cycles and limits that govern the rest of the living world. If you believe, like Margaret Thatcher, that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism, than you will indeed feel that the battle is lost. But most of human cultures throughout most of history have been structured on other principles. The question is not whether we can overthrow the current definition of meaning and social structure. The question is how much catastrophe we will need to endure before we accept the fact that we must live here, in the finite, limited world. We can bring ourselves to heel through unthinkable efforts of collective will, or we can be driven there by biological, material fact.

MR: You left Palo Alto and your teaching post at Stanford for a life in the mountains. What are the differences between a person choosing to live in a city, and another living close to nature?

RP: There is a problem with this question! All of us, everywhere, are living in the thick of nature. In fact, if I had to summarize the vision of The Overstory, it is that there is no separate and exceptional thing called “humanity,” and no independent entity called “nature.” All things are reciprocally bound together; there is really only species that struggles to grasp that! We have been leaving our mark on and altering “wilderness” for as long as we’ve existed, and even our most antiseptic cities are teeming with living things, large and small, that crucially determine what our lives in these densely urban areas are like.

For a person living in the mountains or a person living in the biggest conurbation, the nature of an attentive life is the same: to learn to see what is in front of us, not what we think is or ought to be. There are more than 5.2 million street trees in New York City. If you add to that the shrubs and bushes, there are vastly more woody plants in that city than there are people! But how many people in the city take these creatures seriously? How many realize that the quality of their air and water depends on these plants? How many are aware of the huge increase in their well-being that is being made by these beings who can turn sunlight directly into food and life? How many urbanites are capable of the endless joy in standing in front of a tree and asking, “What is this tree doing that no other tree does? What is it doing that I’ve never seen before?”

Whether in the Smoky Mountains or in the heart of Manhattan, tree consciousness comes down to the same thing: the cultivation of a sensibility that knows that we don’t make the rules, that we’re not alone, and that we are who we are by virtue of the work of all kinds of other living things.

MR: Reading your last answer (How many urbanites are capable of the endless joy in standing in front of a tree and asking, “What is this tree doing that no other tree does?), I was reminded of Merleau-Ponty’s quote: “To see the world…we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.” Some people complain that even if they wish they could stop and see the world, they don’t have the time. They would go crazy if they tried to have an attentive life every day. What is the cost of choosing to tune out many moments/aspects of life? How could one find the “right” balance between an attentive life and one’s daily occupations?

RP: Anyone who claims they don’t have time to slow down is deeply deluding herself. If our lives are frantic, relentless, overdrawn, and blunted with distraction, it is not because of material necessity but because we are searching for meaning in the wrong place. How many minutes of your day go into absolutely essential pursuit of income? How many go into the pursuit of prestige, gossip, overconsumption, social currency, and merely keeping up with “the latest?” Don’t kid yourself: we are making ourselves crazy, not because we have to, but because the things we so frantically pursue are so ultimately ephemeral and unsatisfying. Just stop and look. You can decide, later, as your urge to keep running starts to subside, whether or not you can afford to do so.