Well, we’re back. It had been decades since I’d been to Vienna, and I’d forgotten what a lovely city it is. Gracious, orderly, and physically beautiful, it is a perfect embodiment of the sublime cultural achievements of a great civilization at its apex. (That apex is of course long past, but for now the order, the culture, and the beauty remain.)
Istanbul, where we had never been, was fascinating too, of course, and certainly beautiful as well, if not as consistently and as thematically so as Vienna — but perhaps that was inevitable, given that Vienna, for all its astonishing depth, is essentially the product of a single civilization (aside from the bags of coffee-beans left behind by the Turks in 1683), while Istanbul’s extraordinary stew has included far more ingredients, and has been brewing for quite a bit longer. (Order, though, is a casualty there; in Istanbul entropy, which is hardly anywhere to be seen in Vienna, is evident in every direction, and occasionally seems to have the upper hand.)
As for the “refugee” crisis, we saw little evidence of it in either place; but in the upscale and touristy precincts we haunted in both cities — Vienna’s central First District, and the Galata, BeyoÄŸlu, and Sultanahmet neighborhoods of Istanbul — I’d hardly have expected to, yet. (There were certainly rumblings all round, and the issue dominated the local news.)
I’m getting caught up on news, correspondence, and so on. Back with more, shortly.
10 Comments
Welcome back. Et la vie continue.
Good to see you back safe and sound. The world already feels more orderly.
Thanks! It’s good to be home.
Ah Vienna, where, according to our learned pResident, they speak Austrian (or is it Viennese?). It was the adopted home of Big Ludwig, so, of course, one must pay homage to its cultural props.
But if you scratch a native, as the saying goes, you will likely be confronted by a Nazi.
It appears the scratching is underway.
Hi Malcolm! Arrived here from a recommendation on Megan McArdle’s commentariat from our mutual political opponent, the one who refers to himself as “the one-eyed man” here and “ratiocination” there. I figured anyone he opposed so much, though with respect, had to be a worthwhile fellow, and that wasn’t wrong.
Thanks for the kind words, antiquarian, and welcome.
The most annoying of Peter’s remarks at the McArdle post is his suggestion that there is no rational basis for conservative positions.
To ascribe the conservative’s aims — for example, to shrink and decentralize an out-of-control Federal behemoth, to restore the Constitutional rights of the states, to resist the corrosion of traditional American culture and the displacement of its people by mass Third-World immigration, to address suicidal levels of national debt, and to dismantle the vast bureaucracy that now regulates every aspect of our lives as an entirely unaccountable fourth branch of government — to mere “dyspepsia” and “anhedonia” is as baseless as it is insulting.
Ibid.
I tried making the point to him that the basis of much of the Left’s supposed rationality derives from steering the definitions of terms, and sometimes even from getting people to adopt their neologisms themselves, when they can manage it. That is, that the Left had worked backwards from the desired end results to find what definitions were necessary for the end results to seem rational.
As I told him, this isn’t rationality, but a perversion of rationality. But I doubt it’ll have any impact.