The eyes of youth

A decade ago, I spent a short two weeks wandering around Central Europe -- eastern Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. That would be a lot of territory to see in two weeks, of course. More truthfully, I should say that I spent two weeks visiting large cities in those countries: Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Prague and Budapest.

But in each large city, I did try to get out of town a bit, so that I wasn't locked into a "Famous Capitals" sort of tour. While in Vienna, for example, I made a special effort to hop a train to the little town of Melk. Melk is most famous as the site of Stift Melk -- a very large Benedictine abbey, located scenically on a hill overlooking the Danube.

Why Melk? The power of the written word. Not long before my travels, I had read, entranced, A Time of Gifts, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the first of two volumes describing his wanderings on foot in 1933-35, at the age of 18, from the English Channel to Constantinople (Istanbul).

Leigh Fermor was quite a kid. He had been kicked out of what in America we would call prep school, after he'd been caught smooching with the local grocer's daughter. He nevertheless was already well educated at 18, self-taught to an extent that's difficult today for us to believe. Moreover, he had a sense of self-confidence that permitted him to feel equally at ease with the workers and peasants among whom he traveled and the European aristocrats and diplomats who often took him in, offered him food and shelter, and found him fascinating and agreeable company.

Like a fair number of other English youth in that era, he had a fine sense for both literature and art. And it was his vivid description, in musical metaphors, of Melk abbey that put me on the train from Vienna, headed up the Danube for a day's exploration of Melk:

Overtures and preludes followed each other as courtyard opened on courtyard. Ascending staircases unfolded as vaingloriously as pavanes. Cloisters developed with the complexity of double, triple and quadruple fugues. The suites of state apartments concatenated with the variety, the mood and the décor of symphonic movements. Among the receding infinity of gold bindings in the library, the polished reflections, the galleries and the terrestial and celestial globes, gleaming in the radiance of their flared embrasures, music again seemed to intervene. A magnificent and measured polyphony crept in one's ears.

And so on, and on, and on.

Melk Abbey was indeed beautiful. I studied the same sights described by Leigh Fermor. But my trip journal, after having quoted the above passage, suggests my mild disappointment. And why wouldn't I have been a bit disappointed? A traveler needs a highly trained eye to view architecture as Leigh Fermor did; it also helps to be 18 years old, if you wish to feel it as emotionally and to express it with as little restraint as did this unusual young man. I once again learned the sad lesson that a sense of awe in the presence of magnificent art, architecture or music results only in part from the object that's being contemplated; much depends on the education and sensitivity that the viewer himself brings to the experience.

Leigh Fermor had little to say in his writings about the political currents that already were rocking the regions through which he traveled, but war was already looming ahead. Patrick Leigh Fermor was himself to play a part in that war. He was, in fact, the hero of W. Stanley Moss's memoir of the Cretan resistance, Ill Met by Moonlight. Moss, who was Leigh Fermor's second in command, tells the story of how his superior, as a daring young British Special Operations officer, led a group of partisans hiding in the Cretan mountains in an audacious kidnapping of the German general who was in command of the island.

According to a full page obituary in this week's Economist, Leigh Fermor never talked much in later years about his role in this sensational strike against the German occupation. He seemed far more pleased with the fact that when the German general, now Leigh Fermor's prisoner, one day quoted -- quite unexpectedly -- a line from Horace, "Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte,"¹ Leigh Fermor was able to come right back and complete the thought by reciting from memory the next five stanzas.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died last week at the age of 96. I suspect he is irreplaceable. I imagine, in fact, that his entire generation of eccentrically educated amateurs is irreplaceable, and that their passing is a sad loss to humane civilization.

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¹"You see how [Mount] Soracte stands out white with deep snow..."