To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.–Thomas Hardy
I recently had the pleasure of reading Shaun Chamberlain’s selections from David Fleming’s Lean Logic, organized into an indispensable volume entitled Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy—a book, I should say, that sits on the top of my “must read” list for this year. As I was reading, my mind kept wandering back to my multiple trips to Europe as a child growing up in a Europhile academic family (my father was a historian of ancient and medieval science). What, I started asking myself, was the great lure of Europe for Americans, and why was I wondering about it right now?
My most memorable moments were of course filtered through my parents’ commentary and responses, and subsequent slide shows, but are personally vivid nonetheless.
