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Juino Long evening June sundown out high off New England beginning to cusp the North Atlantic arc that in this season does not go completely dark, dusk to dawn So that in fully risen sun, in off the ocean, first Ireland, then England, then France come green and full, and on past Lyon the risen sun is so high that the long dawn shadows are gone and the landing comes in full summer light and warmth Strong yellow early summer early morning light deeper than yolk yellow, goldenrod, or light chrome yellow, and greener and deeper than gamboge Four hours until the flight to Lod, smooth-sliding train in from the airport to step out into the brilliant summer solstice sun at Cornavin, the railway station's south main entrance front and emblematically European place de gare Full of traveling people, always the most exciting thing about the first hours in Europe, the variety and savvy of the people When staring at a Scandinavian, Pole, a Russian, a Latvian, a Catalan, even a Croat or a Serb, without hearing the language it's hard to know within Europe's new open-border mix who people are, where they go, where they're from standing at the station in the sun squinting around, ready, living, curious, focused, generally purposeful and sound A generation ago you could, as they used to say in Brooklyn, tell by looking at their shoes Follow down along the rue du Mont-Blanc's familiar streetmark blazes, the big white sandstone faŤade of the central post office, the immense cinema billboard on the urban terrace at the rue de Chantepoulet, the vista down toward Ile Rousseau Then along the Grand Quai to the breakfast rendezvous with Maurice He appears five minutes early, that gimpy eager charm of his up out of the parking garage like a First World War infantryman climbing from a bunker, his blue blazer, his wry-smile enthusiastic way of understanding exactly what everything is as it's still going on In the Mövenpick two of his compatriots stop by, wise Genevois metropolitans in their seventies who like him have run their city's affairs well, ridden them in thorough self-interest through whatever contingencies intruded, who define Geneva exactly Others just like them stood here dealing with the situation by the glass-blue surging river's source the morning Caesar left for good after slaughtering tens of thousands of Helvetii Other Genevois conversed the same way, cautious, worldly, savvy, secure, when up on the Mont de la Reformation Calvin tried and then burned Michael Servetus and the cow Genevois burghers who epitomize their city in the Rhone Roman way of continuities of opportunistic stability leading to accumulated wealth After the others leave, Maurice recounts their complicated lives, as rich and varied as his own, their fortunes and foibles, their families sketched with rapid anecdotes to amplify the pleasant substance of this sunny Rhone morning As the Rhone rushes deep cold clear out of the lake exactly here under the bridges into France, downtown Geneva is as much at Europe's center point as Milano Centrale, the Place de Concorde, the Rhine Source, Strasbourg, Rome But Europe's absolute midpoint is the north side of a village church square with Danube-Rhine-Rhone orientation. That square has war memorials plinthed on paving stones that have known starvation, firing squads, halberds, bowmen, officer's prancing horses, wailing, shrieks, angry slogans and uncontrolled sobs We walk the city, Maurice voluble about friends in common, the times, and Israel He drives me out to Genève-Cointrin via the Palais de Nations. Talks of the mortality of others while his private and careful self safe-mode slides in over his breakfast enthusiasm, and, like swinging a dinghy into dock, he pulls into the terminal's drop-off zone for a goodbye designed to finish with muffled feelings In the wise, nonchalant European way that he, his kith and kin, have long managed farewells For after all, who really knows anything at all about the future Steep southwestward takeoff with the sun behind, turn directly over the Défile de l'Eculse's vast miterbox Rhone gap to make course dead over Chamonix and the Mount-Blanc massif High alpine snow-sun-rock-cloud clarity that on the Torino side immediately falls away into industrial Po Valley autostrade smog Oblique slide down along crowded Italy to slant the Adriatic just south of Bosnia and pass dead across Albania Glimpse Albania's brown eroded hills behind a meandering featureless river empty of much of anything large enough to see from thirty thousand feet. Small inactive roads and a blankness that's the same when overflying Cuba and Romania Flying over East Germany before 1989 used to feel the same "It was not ten days in Petrograd that shook the world, but a strike in Gdansk, a procession in Leipzig and the turning of a key one night in Berlin. It is the end of the experiment which is surely much more significant than its start, not only in the people it liberated, but in the lessons that it taught about the arrogance of ideology and the alibi for tyranny that it provided" Already it's remarkably difficult to remember how the communist half century before 1989 could have ever been Unfathomable circumstance of derelict historical commitment and lassitude From the West it was a mystery, sobering and sinister to see across the border points, binoculars up and focusing And when traveling in the Soviet Bloc — a phrase that plunks down now as dated as Holy Roman Empire, Banda Oriental or the Papal States — there was always the awareness of innocuous logging of schedules and travel routes, of being watched Of long-lasting itching powder left in underwear in a Crimean conference hotel where they probably also watched bedroom privacies through one-way mirrors or pinholes in the wall The daily smirking power-game perversions in the old USSR, frenzied drunken exploited and unchecked in boast and bluff bullying of the defenseless, obscene harassment and exploitation of women, brutalizing most people they touched In the manner of government by police Beating up people, kicking dogs So that their surveillance people watching foreigners violently scratch their itching-powdered crotches through pinholes in the wall was just in the nature of the way things were Anyone who visted the USSR deeper than with Intourist tours realized that Knowledge of Cold War nuances and detail dates people Pre-1989 savvy and cynicism already seems embittered and sad "Before my time," that long yellow-brick road from 1945 to now, whenever now turns out to be Born in the eighties, it's Kennedy and Hitler in Berlin, the war where America invaded France to fight the Communists under Charles De Gaulle, then the Vietnam War in Korea against Japan, or something like that Come in to land at Lod in time to catch the last Friday night Sabbath bus to Jerusalem Darkness floods eerie, military-empty, over the yellow central Samarian plain There's disorientation about local geography in Israel, Biblical and actual, all that evasive and acidic expansionist foam about Samaria and Judea Leaving Jerusalem for Jericho or En-Gedi without passing the Mount of Olives, it's necessary to loop around East Jerusalem West Bank, North Bank, who's in Gaza and what goes on around the Damascus Gate Hope here is propaganda linked But walking down from David haMelekh past the French Consulate, yellow-vented bulbuls with vivid eye rings, bubbling, slightly stumbling song, in twos and threes in and out over the high wall sealing off the service warren of the King David Hotel Striking down the hill heading for the Jaffa Gate across the Hinnos Valley gulch below Yemin Moshe Inside the old city walking down the Batei Mahseh with June sun rising onto your forehead from behind the El-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount with the close-in newly guilded Dome of the Rock in sun glare silhouette is oceanic Almost inevitable consummate exhilaration of lifting perceptive joy like that almost anywhere in or near the Old City The city of air and sun above the Spring of Gihon Since the Chalcolithic For at least six thousand years Chalcolithic, Bronze, Iron, Babylonian and Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Crusader, Later Islamic, Israeli and Palestinian Saul, David, Solomon After Judah, the Seleucid Kings, the Ptolemies, the Hasmoneans, the Herods, the Roman Procurators, the Byzantine Emperors, the Caliphs, the Crusader Dynasty, then the Ottomans, the British Mandate, and now Israel The inventories of governance a tumbling cascade Twenty times the length of European settlement in North America Six thousand years of drama, bones in the gullies of those dry Jerusalem hills, eroded native yellow stone, awareness of more than sixty centuries Sixty centuries of people living thirty or forty years, call it three generations a century and it reaches close to two hundred life spans back To a time when only hunters, and then shepherds, hunkered on the ridge on which sits the Dome of the Rock Who gathered brush into a shelter for the night, relished the view, lived there above the Spring of Gihon for the week or for the season, or their lives Back to the inchoate of the profound and distant past Through the sentience of people of all cultures who've watched the sun come up out of the Judean Desert red and splendid on the others' faces Romans arrived overland from Turkey, Syria, or sailed into Jaffa and rode to the great city from the coast to savor its breath of oriental spice and desert air, the vistas, the wonderful food, the cool nights Before them, New Kingdom Egyptian administrators who stayed three hundred years And after the Romans, the Caliphs' entourages from Damascus Then the French Crusaders who took to the long sea from Aigues-Mortes in the Rhone Delta leaving Aigues-Mortes for the Holy Land with banners on the ramparts and a brace of bishops' public prayers Next the Seleucids, who constantly tried to Hellenize the Jews and saw the Eastern Mediterranean as the domain of Jews and Greeks, Greeks and Jews Then the Hasomaneans and Judas Maccabee, but still the Greeks and Jews Unfailing factionalism and strife, often even more acrimonious and violent than anything the Intifadas and Israeli retaliation have yet generated Executions and exiles, dungeons in the rocks, chains, the spearmen, bowmen, battle axes, knives, and now Uzis, cattle prods, helicopters, car bombs, the suicide bombers' plastique Serenity of place and permanence, dry beauty, enduring stone and exquisite architecture, but one of the more deadly places on earth In its magnificent yellow blue light Nearly two hundred generations of human lives within Jerusalem's walls, a flood of history impossible to fold back along its shimmering epiphanies Difficult even to initiate a feeling for the whole, the sum of glee and happiness, terror, sadness, the pain and human gain of Jerusalem's sixty centuries Across six thousand years, some evenings many people, in rain or cold sometimes no one outside at all, people sitting in the evening glow, talking, susurrus, laughter, jibes, kaffiyehs, sandals, chucking pebbles, drawing patterns in the dust, scanning out to the horizon and then back into one another's eyes Chins in hands waiting there on Jerusalem's warm stones in the way that people in warm climates often sit together in the evening At the whim of time Waiting for the sunset and the first cool breeze, sitting on the hills and roofs and walls of evening, watching the clarity of light pass into the privacy of night In Nahalat Shiva off Ben Yuda, with someone from Sinai who goes on about how the blue rock thrushes on the ramparts at Masada beg from tourists Earnest descriptions of the spring and fall migrations across the Sinai in and out of Africa, Arabia, the Indian Ocean's Red Sea tongue, the desert, the mesmerizing desert Penetratingly fundamental things have to do with Israelis and the desert At a King David Street bus stop in the morning, a tiny brown frenzy making her connection from Tel Aviv back out to her desert settlement overlooking Jericho. Passing through Jerusalem via the Bus Station out Jaffa Road on the bus to Yad Vashem Out to Jafo, talk with such intensity that the twelve or fifteen minutes on the snarling jab-accelerating bus were as nothing. She leaned nearer and nearer to fit it all in telling me with painstaking exactness how to find her tiny desert settlement, then she jumped out and churned away into the Central Bus Station to make her trip's next leg She and nine other settlers in three caravans on the desert hills west of Jericho, three guns, two hours to walk down to Jericho below yet possible for them to peer down into Jericho itself. She said it was the most marvelous way to live imaginable Pallid swifts skimming over Jerusalem in evening profusion, in the morning a lesser kestrel over the King David's gardens In the vastly stimulating net of Israeli life, in a spacious glassy room in vined stone cluster house in Qiryat Menahem for talk and talk and talk, an architect's house, amazing phantasmagoric awarenesses of the drama that underlay that early summer evening lifts all the way back in complexity and depth through every awareness of Jerusalem's ages and light In a dizzying continuity Xanthic Jerusalem Inside the Damascus Gate, the tight double-bend narrow passage, watch two gawky Hasidic boys running north on El Wad to get out of the Muslim Quarter, black shoes sliding on the cobbles, running like spooked Holstein heifers with hips stiff and high On the point where El Wad meets Bet Ha-Bad right there inside the Damascus Gate, two brothers, one glib and congenial, the other quiet and the most efficient, sell delectable falafels, brothers as brothers can be They work filling pita and frying the chickpea balls at the height of their energies, their brotherness together in their sublime falafel stand My brother would have vastly enjoyed this place He would have ordered one falafel after another with me like swapping rounds of beers and we would have been happy and proud and absorbed with one another He never came to the Middle East He didn't know the gaping desert fall away eastward to Ein Gedi and Masada into the Dead Sea's broad natron pan blinding halogenic white glare high sun pan absolute gasping dry heat across toward Jordan's mountains Didn't venture the Moab. Never saw the craggy escarpment Dead Sea Scrolls cave outcrops below the high and long bajada sage desert reaching away That profoundly ancient place Except for the road and the occasional fences and marking stakes, that desert is exactly as it has been since people first ranged flocks from their black tents before staking out their scant Ein Gedi oasis settlements Goat frisk shaggy shepherd brown cloak sandal on boulder with staff set poised framed hirsute face's gleaming teeth and eyes It was their scrolls they placed within the caves, the one god, the writing, the cohesiveness And all of it had to do with Jerusalem of course +++++++++++++++ A sampling credit to Peter Pulzer on "the arrogance of ideology."

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