Coffee revisited

Gregory (right) and an old friend

Coffee is a comfortable subject.  Especially comfortable for those of us who live in Seattle, artisan coffee capital of the world.  And maybe it is because coffee is such a comfort food (food?) that an essay I wrote back in January 2013, "Sharing Coffee," has been one of my more popular posts over the years.

The photo accompanying that essay -- two steaming cups of coffee on a table, presumably accompanied by relaxed conversation -- is enough to make our Northwest Corner brain waves slide into a happy Alpha rhythm.  It may have been that photo rather than my actual topic that attracted readers.

But "Sharing Coffee" sprang from a meeting over coffee I'd just had with Gregory, a college sophomore and former neighbor I'd known and chatted with occasionally since his early teens, but hadn't seen in person since he'd abandoned Seattle for a university in New York City.  I used our meeting as a vehicle to praise the virtues of inter-generational friendships.

Whatever happened to Gregory?  Funny you should ask.  I had coffee with him again yesterday, in the University of Washington student union.  He's now a college graduate -- not from his original university in New York, but from Columbia College in Chicago, a school specializing in the performing arts and related disciplines.  A devoted fan of comedy in all forms since childhood, Gregory received his B.A. in Television Writing and Producing.  He's spent the last couple of months with his family in Seattle before heading south next week for an internship with a Hollywood organization.

I bragged in my 2013 essay about my ability to talk with a college student without talking down to him from the great heights of experience afforded by my advanced years.  The difference now is that he now knows many things about many things that I don't -- our talk yesterday was at least as much a learning experience for me as for him.

Gregory has completed a pilot screenplay for a 30 minute television series, an example of his writing that he can show future employers.  At my behest, he texted me a copy after our meeting.  It was extremely well written, and wildly funny.  Reading it, and talking to Gregory, reminds me that occupational paths in which I've never shown any particular interest -- and for which I certainly have no talent -- can be fascinating for the right person.

I'm looking forward to following this guy in his future career.  It will obviously be a career with many twists and turns -- the career paths available in my own profession are generally plodding and unimaginative by comparison.  So, yeah.  I hope to keep my eye on him. 

And share another cup of coffee in the not too distant future.

St. John's Eve



San Juan cae en junio.
--Alejandro Casona, La Dama del Alba

Friday night was St. John's Eve. 

St. John's Eve is hardly an event of any significance in the Northwest Corner.  I'd never heard of it until my freshman year in college.  As part of the drudgery of studying Spanish, we were required to read a Spanish play called La Dama del Alba; the fourth act begins on St. John's Eve, with bonfires burning.  I still have the book, but remembered nothing of the story until I read, just now, the Wikipedia synopsis.

From a religious point of view, the celebration marks the vigil of the Feast of St. John the Evangelist, celebrated the following day on June 24.  But in Spain, and other Hispanic countries, St. John's Eve is a de facto celebration of the summer solstice -- the longest day of the year.  It is celebrated by the lighting of bonfires.

My only personal acquaintance with these fiery celebrations dates from a trek I was doing in Peru many years ago.  We were sitting around in the late evening twilight, following dinner, when we began to notice fires sprouting all over the hillsides around us.  We nervously asked our guide if we were in danger from wildfires, and he assured us that the locals were simply celebrating St. John's Eve.  I had a flashback, at the time, to my college-days reading of La Dama.

St. John's Eve isn't merely an Hispanic celebration.  In Ireland, it is called "Bonfire Night":

In some rural parts of Ireland, particularly in the north-west, Bonfire Night is held on St. John's Eve, when bonfires are lit on hilltops. Many towns and cities have "Midsummer Carnivals", with fairs, concerts and fireworks, around the same time. In County Cork in southwest Ireland the night is commonly referred to as bonfire night and is among the busiest nights of the year for the fire services.

Similar celebrations are held in Denmark, parts of England, the Baltic states, Scandinavia, France ("Fête de la Saint-Jean"), Italy, Quebec, and Poland. 

Bonfires are a common, central part of the celebration in all these countries.

As a celebration of the solstice, the celebration makes more sense the farther north one goes.  In Scandinavia, the days are impressively long at the summer solstice.  In Spain, not so much.  And in Peru, where I first observed St. John's bonfires, just south of the equator, the solstice is virtually meaningless.

The United States stands curiously apart from this widespread tradition -- just as it has, until recently, from worldwide soccer fanaticism -- with the odd exception of Louisiana, where the night marks a Voodoo celebration held on New Orleans's Bayou St. John.

When I was in northern England a couple of weeks ago, the sky was dark for less than five hours each night -- from about 11 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.  Here in Seattle, our nights are slightly longer, but we are the northern-most major city in the continental United States.  We have every reason to light bonfires, but we don't.

But sitting out on my back deck at 10:30 p.m., observing the final dying illumination of twilight, I share the wonder of people elsewhere at the seasonal changes.  Maybe tonight I'll light a match, and hold it up, as one small, token, belated celebration of St. John's Eve.  And a reminder of those distant days when I could actually read, haltingly, a Spanish play.

The contemplative universe

NBC Mach

As you stumble your way across the room, do you ever stub your toe on a chair that you suspect moved into place just to cause you pain?  As though it were conscious?  Maybe it is, say some scientists, maybe it is.

Well, not exactly.  Your furniture doesn't have eyes and mouths; it doesn't sing along with you as in a Looney Tune.  But scientists and philosophers who subscribe to some form of panpsychism argue that the one constant in the universe is consciousness, and that consciousness is manifested in various ways -- depending on the panpsychic's particular theory.

I'd never heard the word "panpsychism" until a Facebook friend shared an article with me, from this week's NBC Mach, entitled "Is the Universe Conscious?" accompanied by an astronomer's photograph of a sprawling nebula.  Pretty interesting -- scary? -- but the title describes only one of the more extreme possible consequences of panpsychism -- that any complex system exhibits consciousness, and the universe is pretty complex.

In a lengthy article, Wikipedia describes panpsycism in less dramatic terms:

Panpsychism is one of the oldest philosophical theories, and has been ascribed to philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Plato, Averroes, Spinoza, Leibniz and William James. Panpsychism can also be seen in ancient philosophies such as Stoicism, Taoism, Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism. During the 19th century, panpsychism was the default theory in philosophy of mind, but it saw a decline during the middle years of the 20th century with the rise of logical positivism. The recent interest in the hard problem of consciousness has revived interest in panpsychism.

The Mach article starts off with the mind-boggling idea of galactic consciousness, but quickly turns to the more complex issues presented by quantum theory.  The writer describes the discussion in 2006 by a German physicist, Bernard Haisch, who proposed that quantum fields, producing and transmitting consciousness, pervade all of empty space, and that the transmitted consciousness then flows into and is manifested by complex systems in the presence of energy.  The more complex the system, the more obvious and intense the consciousness.  The human brain is pretty complex.  That chair in your living room?  Less so.

The universe is also complex, but even most panpsychics seem to doubt that galaxies do much independent thinking.  Our sun, one notes, is far less complex a system than a single E. Coli bacterium, and we know how deeply bacteria contemplate.

Most scientist, subscribers to panpsychism or not, seem to agree that consciousness is somehow related to complexity.  For me, at least, the problem is the inability to define consciousness in objective terms, other than as something related to complexity.  We believe ourselves to be conscious, and dogs seem to mimic us in some ways.  Therefore, we assume dogs share to some degree our own consciousness.  But we can't prove that they aren't just parasitic little automatons that have evolved the ability to survive by imitating their human hosts.  In fact, we can't really begin to argue whether dogs are really conscious like us, because we don't understand what consciousness means even in ourselves. 

"I think, therefore I am," said Descartes.  Maybe the best we can say, or will ever be able to say, is, "I worry about whether I'm conscious, therefore I am conscious." Maybe your chair worries, too? No way to prove it doesn't.

A teacher in Siam

When I was a boy, world was better spot
What was so was so, what was not was not
Now, I am a man, world have changed a lot
Some things nearly so, others nearly not.

--Oscar Hammerstein II

I saw the movie of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, The King and I, as a teenager, and soon after acquired an LP with the songs from the Broadway production.  I liked the songs, of course, but I was also attracted by the supposed exoticism of far-off Siam.  The story of Anna, a British teacher, hired by the King of Siam to teach his children, a teacher who ended up teaching the king himself a thing or two, was perfectly designed to appeal to 1950s America -- a nation confident that it had a thing or two to teach the world.

The story was based loosely on actual events that occurred in the court of Siamese King Mongkut in the 1860s.  I'm not sure that I realized -- or that all American viewers realized -- that the story dealt with the distant past, rather than the recent past.  I knew enough to doubt that the King of Siam -- many  maps still called Thailand "Siam" -- actually strutted around manfully like Yul Brynner, but I had no doubt that the king, whenever he ruled, had been an absolute monarch, had a childlike fascination with the "advanced" culture of the West, spoke in fluent but pidgin English, and devoted much of his time to his many wives. 

That was the nature of foreign potentates.

Even the name "Siam" sounded wonderfully strange and exotic.  Some day, I perhaps dreamed, I might board a steamer in San Francisco and make a port of call at mysterious Bangkok.  A once in a lifetime visit that would be the wonder of the folks back home.

I never dreamed that by the time I had reached retirement age, my passports would bear any number of stamps from Thailand.  Or that "Thailand" is what everyone would be calling Siam.

Or -- and this is what really prompts this post -- that one of my very own nephews would have just moved to "Siam." Denny moved this past month to Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city, where he will begin teaching sixth grade in the fall at the same international school attended by his third grade daughter.  This past week, he sent us "farangs" back home an email bursting with excitement about the colleagues and neighbors he's already met, the school at which he'll be teaching, and the house he's leasing.

Knowing Denny's excellent reputation as a teacher in California, I have no doubt that his sixth graders will be well taught in the coming years.  And Denny will learn as much about Thailand from his students as he will from reading the local papers and talking to his neighbors.  For as Anna herself told her pupils in The King and I:

It's a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you'll be taught.

Denny and I traveled together to Chiang Mai a decade ago.  It's a beautiful town, with exotic tropical vegetation and exciting outdoor markets.  It's certainly different from America.  It's not the mysterious Orient, however, that I would have expected from watching Yul Brynner cavorting about the stage.   It's a real world filled with real people -- people like everyone else in some ways, but uniquely Thai as well.  Denny will learn a lot, and --whenever he returns to America -- he will have a wonderful background in another culture.

And I intend to learn a lot from his adventure, as well.  For me, as well as for the King: "World has changed a lot."  And my passport has room for many more stamps.  Stamps from Thailand. 

Swallows and Amazons

Kids learn by playing.  By playing as children, we learn skills and practice adult roles.  The more imaginative the play, the better we prepare for an imaginative and creative life.

My brother and I spent a number of years repeatedly devising and playing versions of a game that required use of the entire second floor of our house.  Army men and equipment, spacemen, cowboys and Indians -- even, during certain decadent stages, marbles -- were personnel in our game.  My brother loved military life and warfare; I loved politics and diplomacy.  We joined our interests in a complex and ever-evolving game that kept us fascinated until we were embarrassingly far into our teens.

While in England's Lake District this past month, I learned of a book about kids who were at least equally imaginative, but who operated on a far vaster scale than the second floor of a house.  The book was Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (1930), which, as I now discover, was but the first of a twelve book series involving the same group of children.*  The story takes place on an idyllic lake in the Lakes (inspired by a combination of Lake Windermere and Coniston Water), where the Walkers spend their summer holidays.

The four Walker children -- John, Susan, Titty, and Roger -- are a cohesive group of siblings who spend every free moment alone together.  Roger, the youngest, is seven years old.  The others' ages aren't given, but I'd guess that John, the oldest is twelve to fourteen.   They are imaginative in the extreme, and fanatically knowledgeable about sailing (their father is a naval officer serving in the Far East).   The book begins with Roger, trying to run home as quickly as possible, finding it necessary to tack back and forth against the wind while running up the lawn.

The mother is wonderfully tolerant of her children's independence, and wonderfully whimsical by nature.  As the kids invent words in "native" languages, she willingly uses those words in her conversations with them.  The kids have been lobbying for permission to spend the last week or so of their holiday on an uninhabited island in the middle of the lake.  Their mother requires her husband's consent.  He responds -- himself obviously no stranger to whimsy -- with a telegram:  "Better Drowned than Duffers.  If not Duffers Won't Drown."  This telegram is accepted as a somewhat cryptic consent.

The plot is simple.  Kids sail alone to the island in a family boat, the "Swallow,"and set up camp.  They meet and engage in mock warfare with a couple of equally creative girls who call themselves the Amazons.  They have some simple adventures, a wonderful week, and leave with a parental promise that they will return the following summer.

The children reinterpret every observation in terms of their imaginary game -- they are explorers, the two girls are pirates, all other people on and around the lake are untrustworthy and possibly dangerous "natives."  The small island itself has been discovered only now by themselves.  Their mother -- sometimes Queen Elizabeth, sometimes"the female native" -- makes occasional visits in another boat to bring extra food and convince herself that her brood is still alive; she is welcomed as a benevolent member of a foreign tribe.

These are the kind of kids who, even before the story begins, have named a prominent hill near their house from which the lake can be viewed "Darien" -- because it was from Darien in Panama that Balboa first spotted the Pacific Ocean.

What's unique about the book is the kids' intricate knowledge of sailing, and the author's willingness to describe every action, every move, the young sailors take while sailing -- as well as the details of setting up camp, and of their wildlife observations while camping and exploring.  Much of this knowledge was taught to them by their father, much also is self-taught, inspired by their idolization and emulation of the distant Naval officer.  The author trusts us to be equally conversant.

"These little boats often do without stays at all.  Is there a cleat under the thwart where the mast is stepped?"

"Two," said John, feeling.  The mast fitted in a hole in the forward thwart, the seat near the bows of the boat.  It had a square foot, which rested in a slot cut to fit it in the kelson.

What's also unique is the author's confidence that his young readers will avidly follow all the nautical details that he offers them.  I certainly was impressed.  Call me ignorant, but I never knew that rowing a sailboat from the stern was called "sculling" -- a necessary maneuver with sails down in tight places or when the wind was still.  To the Walker kids, knowing how and when to scull was like my own knowing how, as a child, to patch a flat tire on a bike.

Children in any period are imaginative and creative.  In today's world, I suspect that most of this creativity is devoted to digital games.  There's something to be said, however, for a world where the same imagination and creativity are expressed in ways that bring children into the outdoors, teaching them to sail a boat under all weather conditions, to set up camp, to survive a storm, to cook over a fire, to explore rough terrain.  All without the constant supervision and guidance of adults, and all before the teen years really begin.

As the mother remarked good-naturedly at one point:

We are going home at the end of the week.  It would be a pity if two or three of you were to get drowned first.

Ransome may have idealized the Walker children, but Swallows and Amazons was written for kids who could easily imagine themselves in the Walkers' position if they only had a lake, a boat, and a little training at their disposal.  I'm not sure how a child would react to the book today.  Perhaps he'd be bored.

Not all changes in our world have been "Progress."
-----------------------------------------

*Two British films of the book have been released, in 1974 and 2016.  The BBC also produced a television series based on the book in 1963.

Cows may safely graze

England is laced with public right of ways.  As you amble through the countryside, you rarely encounter a fenced field that doesn't have a gate or stile through which you, a member of the public, have a right to enter the field, emerging at a similar exit on the other side.  For your part, you don't trample growing crops and you don't annoy the animals.

But what if the animals choose to annoy you?

This week, an elderly, retired professor from Magdalen College, Oxford, was out for a walk in Essex -- the sort of daily walk he probably has taken most of his life.  The sort of walk I took through Westmorland these past couple of weeks.

According to a British newspaper, there were cows grazing in the field.  The cows "became agitated and charged at him."  The professor was heard screaming for help.  He was trampled to death before help could arrive.

A tragic and puzzling story.  Agitated cows?  Charging?  I would hardly have believed it, but for my own experience the first day of my hike, while still in northern Westmorland.  Like the professor, I entered a large field, climbing over a stile.  Cows were scattered about in widely separated groups. My route took me within a hundred feet of one such group.

I've walked past many cows in my life.  Cows either stare at me blankly, or continue grazing, or move slightly away.  But these cows were curious.  They began slowly moving toward me.  I didn't stop to interact and, at this point, hardly noticed them.  I had located the stile on the far fence, and was aiming toward it.  But the cows were aiming at me.  They weren't running; they didn't appear "agitated."  But they were closing in on me. I thought it was a bit funny, in both senses of the word, but still wasn't concerned.

Then I noticed cows farther afield.  They were beginning to move in paths that would intercept my own.  Not hastily.  But deliberately.  The cows behind were now close behind.  The cows afield were joining those behind.  I was walking faster.  So were the cows.  They were breathing just behind my ears.  The original five or six cows had swelled to a much larger number.

I felt like the Pied Piper of Westmorland.  But the "children" I was leading seemed less than innocent.

I reached the stile with hot cow breath on my neck.  I skipped up and over the ladder and looked back.  The cows had come as far as they could.  They were clustered around the stile, staring at me.  I took the photo above.  The photo doesn't do justice to the number of cows outside its frame.  The cows didn't look malicious.  Or murderous.  They didn't look much of anything.  They didn't really seem cow-like.

As Bucky Katt said in one of his incisive observations, the cows appeared to be staring at me, "thinking stupid cow thoughts."  No doubt the cows that trampled the Magdalen professor emeritus looked equally stupid and placid, thinking cow thoughts, while walking back and forth over his body. 

I wasn't scared.  My heart wasn't pounding, although maybe it should have been.  I just felt unnerved.  I felt relieved that I'd had no problem crossing the stile.   

Gazing upon Oxford's "dreaming spires"

And that sweet City with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening,
--Matthew Arnold

A life without regrets is a life not worth living.  No matter how "successful" the world may judge you, deep in your heart you know that you have failed to climb to what computer gamers would call "the next level."

For me, I suppose, that next level -- perhaps several levels above -- would have been a degree from Oxford.  I'm not sure when my infatuation with Oxford began, but it was certainly reinforced by reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, and watching the TV series based on that novel.  But Waugh's Oxford was an atavistic experience of social connections, friendships, and traditions.  That picture, especially when accompanied by the series' theme music, was immensely attractive.

But I wanted to be an Oxford scholar.  I saw myself -- realistically -- as the young man who sat preparing for the next day's tutorial while others were out getting drunk.

Thus the appeal that's led me back to visit Oxford on several occasions -- always frustrated by the knowledge that I am seeing only a glimpse of the surface, while the reality of Oxford life is shared by only the elect few.  Nevertheless, last Thursday, my last full day in England, I took an early morning train to Oxford for one more brief visit. 

I wandered the hallowed streets -- somewhat less dreamy now, than when Matthew Arnold rhapsodized upon them -- and paid a few pounds for admission to two of the larger and more architecturally striking colleges -- Christ Church and Magdalen.  Christ Church has created a path marked by arrows for visitors to follow, and before you know it you're back out on the street.  Magdalen, however, is more generous.  Once past the turnstile, you're pretty much on your own.  You can go everywhere you want, except the rooms of students and dons, and the dining halls. 

Magdalen's a beautiful school, and I could see myself happily ensconced within -- the same emotion of being where I belonged that I acknowledged feeling, a few posts ago, while studying in the old law school facilities at the University of Washington. I gazed with envy at kids walking down the street, wearing the vest-like mini-gowns that told the world they were Oxford undergraduates.

But would I really have enjoyed it?  Back in Seattle, I perused message boards on the topic of admission to Oxford and the Oxford student experience.  Those writers posting were all current or past Oxford students.  Nearly all agreed that, regardless of whatever misgivings they may have originally felt about how they would fit in at Oxford, it had been a life-changing experience and one they wouldn't have missed.

The fact that they had all been brilliant enough to have been admitted, however, certainly skewed the results.  Admission of British students requires extremely high A-level exam scores following the sixth form -- what we would call the last two years of high school -- with an early concentration on one or two fields that the student intends to pursue at the university level.  Selection for interviews is based entirely on the A-levels, and the interviews themselves are an intensive investigation into the applicant's academic and personal suitability for Oxford studies.

For applicants from foreign countries, Oxford tries to accommodate the different preparatory programs those countries use.  Thus, with American high school students, the university looks to AP and IB scores (but not SATs) as the closest analogue to British A-levels.  But it's difficult, because the two testing systems aren't strictly equivalent.  As a result, although Oxford has a fairly large number of American graduate students, the proportion of American undergraduates is small.

That would have been disheartening to me -- especially having gone to high school in the Paleozoic era, before Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate programs had been invented.  And considering the lack of specialization in American high schools, in the absence of AP or IB classes, I would have been totally unprepared academically for consideration by Oxford.

Also, several former students observed that Oxford is a good choice for a certain type of personality -- students who enjoy thinking out loud and arguing their conclusions with some conviction.  Most teaching is done in tutorials -- individual or very small group settings with "tutors."  If a student hasn't kept up with his studies, it becomes all too apparent at the weekly tutorials.  Students who are equally intelligent but who excel more obviously in writing, some said, would do better at more conventional universities. 

I try to remember myself as an 18-year-old.  I was outspoken in high school classes, but that was no great accomplishment where I went to school.  I was shy socially, but not so shy academically.  At my university, all freshmen took a course called "History of Western Civilization."  All students attended a weekly lecture, and then, three times a week, attended small class groups of about twenty, each led by a professor who guided discussions based on extensive reading.  Grades were heavily dependent on participation in class discussions.

I enjoyed taking part in the discussions.  Maybe, then, I would have enjoyed Oxford's tutorial system.  On the other hand, I have no doubt that I've always performed better in writing than in speaking.  Even as a trial attorney, my oral presentations required careful preparation -- I didn't speak well  off the cuff, unless absorbed in a heated argument.

So, I don't know.  Reading the student comments did make the Oxford experience -- both the admissions process and the day to day academic life -- seem intimidating.  On the other hand, our minds and personalities are flexible when we're 18.  And stepping outside our comfort zone is an excellent path to growth.  Or, if too far out of our comfort zone, disaster!

But, as we say, it's all academic.  An Oxford education exists only in my fantasies -- and probably would have been nothing but fantasy under the best of circumstances.  And at my present age, even post-graduate education is out of the question.  All universities -- not just Oxford and Cambridge -- insist on investing their limited resources in students who possess a few more years life expectancy than I can offer.

Ah well.  I can still walk the streets of Oxford's "dreaming spires," and dream my own silent dreams.

Walking a small county

Churchyard in Beetham

I returned from England on Friday.  Eight days hiking in Westmorland, with a couple of days in London beforehand, and one in Oxford thrown in for dessert.  Six days beneath the half cloudy, half sunny skies of England -- weather a Seattle hiker can relate to -- and two days of rain. 

But even a day of torrential rain -- as one of those days happened to be -- can be fun when the temperature is moderate, the scenery is attractive, and a dry room and convenient pub await one at the end of the day.

I hiked from the tidy, former county town of Appleby in the north, eastward to the Lake District, south through Patterdale and Grasmere and Troutbeck, and finally -- leaving the Lakes behind -- south to the Irish Sea coast through Westmorland's largest town, Kendal.

Over the pass between the
Grasmere and Patterdale
watersheds

I felt akin to Frodo and his companions, walking through strange and foreign lands.  Walking across the pastures and pleasant small towns of northern Westmorland, up and over the eastern fells of the Lakes, along the shores of Ullswater and Grasmere and Windermere, and finally southward through the prosperous rural and suburban precincts of the old Barony of Kendal (one of the few constituencies to vote Liberal Democratic in Thursday's election), all the way to the sea at Arnside. 

I thus visited a wondrous and varied world on foot.  And yet, a little research when I returned home revealed that the entire former county of Westmorland is only slightly larger than Thurston County in Washington -- a smallish county in which our state capital of Olympia is situated. 

Hiking across pastures

Perceived distance depends on how one travels.  When I reached Kendal, near the end of my trek, and saw posters advertising a concert in Appleby, my first impression was -- "who would go that far away just for a concert?"  But if you have a car, who wouldn't drive "from one end of Thurston county to the other"?  Traveling on foot lets you feel how distances were understood during the great majority of England's history.  For most people -- and not just serfs -- a county was one's entire world.  In fact, one's town or village was, for the most part, one's entire world. 

Roman road

We are so accustomed to crossing counties in a matter of minutes by car or train that much of history before the steam engine makes little sense to us.  Having to walk from town to town reminds us of just how long a mile actually is.  It shows us how residents of two towns, ten miles apart, might well speak in different dialects or accents.  Or even in totally different languages, rooted in Norse or Germanic or Celtic -- as my review of Rory Stewart's The Marches discussed last December.

In some ways, the world -- especially a world so full of history as England -- seems more "real" when one walks it.  When you stroll past trees and stone buildings that have existed for centuries.  When you follow a path that was actually a Roman road built so that Roman legions could march from one military camp to the next.  I walked a couple of miles along one long, narrow lane, lined on both sides with dense hedgerows.  Scientists have studied the composition of plants within those hedgerows and determined they were planted in about 1100 A.D.  Who would notice or care if he swept by in a car at 50 mph?

All very well, of course -- but my craving for authenticity of experience goes only so far.  I deigned to fly by jet to and from England.  I didn't insist on sailing around the Horn.