Into Thin Air (2)

Hemingway's observation:

Switzerland is a small steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.

Precisely.  Everywhere there are Chalets, but they'd look funnily out of place if not for the ever-present mountains.

Chalets at Mürren: Cuckoo, Cuckoo (left, author; right, McDade)

If you range into cities like Zurich or Luzern, off in the distance -- slight or far -- you see snowy mountains.  Unlike the wide spread of Rocky Mountains in the US, Switzerland's mountains are much closer together. In consequence, much of Switzerland is made up of toweringly steep way-ups that squeeze against the narrow, dizzyingly-down valleys; it's a paradise for those who live exist in a sideways land.

These geographical physics (up/down vs sideways) help to explain Iowa's new motto: "Welcome to Iowa.  We hope you brought something to do."

One Consequence of Sideways

So.  You must get out of sideways land and go to one that's up and down -- and do so regularly.  You go, for instance, to Switzerland where there are things to do.  Switzerland's famous mountains (you can read about them anywhere) -- have a truth about them: they are dangerous and have claimed many lives -- 500 on the Matterhorn since it was first ascended.  There are consequences to up and down.  The stories (as in the classic book The White Spider, about the Eiger) will make your palms sweaty with vertical edginess.  Yet what do you gain with such exposure?

 

Clouds and Cliffs along the Hornli Ridge (source: video capture, author)

You gain something inestimable.  With the exposure comes the views of massive spaces of still air between the rock faces and glaciers, space often punctuated with the dimly heard clunking and tinkling of cow bells tweedling up from the valley 2000 feet below.  You will also meet cows high in the mountains where they feed on the steep and slanting carpets of grass and flowers.  You can read about it.  But it's not the same.  You have to go there.

 The Hollow North Face of the Eiger (left) next to the
Snowier Mönch with the Eiger Glacier between them;
viewed from Kleine Scheidegg (source: author)

And the thing about a mountain here (not least the Matterhorn) -- it matters.  Even when it's encased in cloud.  It feels like a home for which you've longed but have never been to -- well worth all the huffing and puffing required to get there.

The Hörnlihütte (yellow square) on the Ridge

What else is here?  Consider how sensible the Swiss are!  Well, with everyone's money in their banks, they'd best be fairly sensible.  But they also market their own goods smartly: Victorinox everywhere, with their diverse products.  The workers in the mountains -- whether on their fabulously designed high railways or gondolas -- all wear Switzerland's own Mammut vests and jackets.  Of course, there are Swiss watches, not just in the train stations.  Everywhere.  And their foods -- not merely the diverse sausages, prosciutto (including lamb), myriad cheeses, and breads -- are all brilliant.  And then the Swiss engineering in a million other products, including their gondolas and ski lifts -- that even turn corners.  Amazing.

 So too: the cows sport Swiss-made bells of various sizes, as do the domestic goats (not the wild Ibex peering down at you from ledges 800 feet above as you hike past).  Every little move a cow makes sets the bell ringing.  It might be very jolly -- it sounds so and, apparently, the animals are jolly wearing them.  But if it were around our own necks we'd be A) deaf ("What?.... What?") and B) distracted at every turn.

And yet, pop into a hardware store in Zermatt, for instance, and you will find the usual farming supplies, bolts, nuts, wrenches/spanners -- everything a hardware store in a rural area offers, but also -- bells.  Huge, big, middling, and small: bells.  Swiss made, which means not just simply well made but brilliantly so. What other country boasts such a thing?  And there they are in a window, all lined up for the keepers of cattle.

Klinkle-Klunk: a Swiss-made Firmann Bell

And some of the older Chalets that no longer house cattle-keepers, like this below, sport the old bells.  The shaped and soldered sheet-metal bells are for summer grazing; the round, cast bells are for when the cattle come down in the fall.  Why?  I don't know: an inn keeper told me this.

A Chalet in Mürren Sporting Its Old Bells (source: author)

It's a magnificent country that whispers into your Imagination, just as the Romantics told us it would.

 Lauterbrunnen (Source: myswitzerland)

And if you are a Votary of the Blue Flower, it's the only place to go.  Just ask Heinrich von Ofterdingen [Link].

In the Swiss Alpine Tundra (source: author)

Valentine's Day: Love's Two Arrows

Cupid Awakens Psyche (by Canova)

Hearts, sweets, roses -- Cupid and romance -- a day to celebrate Eros.  The romantic objectives of Valentine's Day are expressed in many places, including in a text much older than Valentine or even Cupid for that matter: The Song of Solomon: 

"Come ... blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits."

Well!  That's HAWT!

People forget that Cupid (or Eros in Greek) bears two arrows: gold and lead.  The gold makes people fall in love, the other fall out.  Shakespeare, of course, plays (to pun...) with this in A Midsummer Night's Dream when Puck, sent on his mission by Oberon, makes Titania fall in love with the next being she sees.

Unfortunately, the Queen of the Fairies, Titania -- well above being physically mortal but not beyond suffering infatuation's unpredictable power -- gazes upon Bottom, an egotistical weaver in the town.  She falls for this ass-of-a-man who, not ironically, has grown the head of an actual ass to fit his personality.  Ever meet a "complete ass"?  Bottom is the man, inside and out.

Men Have Occasionally Fallen for Some Ass, but a Queen!?  (Source: nickbottomsblog)

Titania falls out of love with Bottom when Oberon has mercy on her and corrects her vision:

TITANIA
My Oberon, what visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.

OBERON
There lies your love.

TITANIA
How came these things to pass?
O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now! (4.1.77-81)

See?  The whole problem is with the eyes: "...young men's love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes." Shakespeare again.  (Note: it says "young men's...eyes.")  And, of course, love--or at least infatuation --makes you blind.  Do ya think?  Titania -- in love with an ass: she can't see the faults in him that everyone else sees.  Her faerie companions can only roll their eyes as she dotes on this butt of a being.

In Shakespeare's day the idea was that the faculty of vision worked by "eye-beams" -- that is, light proceeded from people's eyes, like a beam, and illumined an object so they could see it.  Love, and especially "Love at first sight," occurred when two people's eye-beams crossed and -- Lo! --  "I loved you from the first time I laid eyes on you!" is how it all goes down.

Primarily, Love makes us do stupid things -- or at least contemplate doing them.  What is the fairly recent lyric (un-poetic, pop, and cliche)?  "I'd catch a grenade for ya -- yeah yeah yeah."  And do we ever wish Bruno would, please?  Not really -- not all the time.  But I bet he wouldn't.  And I bet most of the poets who said they'd climb mountains, swim oceans, slay dragons, and go off Questing through the many ages didn't actually do what they had promised in the heat of infatuation.  What does a teenager promise when he's wanting some?  Anything.  Still.  That's how love makes us feel: that we'd "do anything for love" -- but not to quote Meatloaf.

Even the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in the 1600s (better known as the poet John Donne -- his name rhymes with "dunn") felt it: 

Off with that wiry Coronet and shew
The hairy Diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then safely tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
.     .     .     .     .
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.

That's Donne writing to his wife -- "Elegy XIX:  To His Mistress [Wife] upon Going to Bed."  I bet Donne did her.  I bet she indeed was un-Donne and then completely Donne. And if Donne was done before she was, I'd say he was one rotten rector in Love's Temple.

For the "Puritan" and "agelast" (ἀγέλαστος) [Link] among us, I will say "yes, of course -- there is agape [ἀγάπη], divine love, and love is more than sex, and sex without love is emptiness."  Well, yeah.  But if that's all you know about it, I'm going to assume your bedroom is pretty boring.  You might just recall that the Song of Solomon is...in the Bible, right?  No explaining that away.  Think of it this way: what's agape without consummation?  What's love without the beautiful (and pointed) line from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Ceremony of Marriage): "With my body I thee worship"?

St Valentine was, about the year 270 AD (or CE if you like), arrested, beaten to death with clubs, and then beheaded for secretly marrying Christian couples (during a time when Christians were persecuted) -- but that's not quite the whole story: Emperor Claudius II had banned marriages because he had a hard time getting men to join the army: they were too devoted to their wives and girlfriends (or "besotted" with them, as one scholar says: the men being "in the grip of  Ἄτη, or "Ate" -- pronounced "AH-tay").  The story has it that the Saint sent a final note to a girl who had become a friend while he was in prison: the jailer's daughter.  He signed it, "your Valentine."

Valentine's Day is a euphemism: it's about Eros, about how Love -- or infatuation, anyway -- makes us feel.  That's Cupid's influence.  Cupidity.  Eroticism.  Desire.  Fawning.  Wobbly knees.  Being a fool for love.  It's about the "hay day in the blood" (Hamlet).  It's the Springtime in the stamen and the pistil and the bee who necked-her.

Like a bee to the flower, we're drawn by something sweet (chocolates), tingly bits (champagne), a come-hither look (Oh, aye!), and a flower dressed (or nearly so) and on display to entice the bee.

One other point: Cupid is not well behaved.  He's usually and perpetually a very naughty lad.  The only time he is behaving is in Spenser's Faerie Queene (1596), when his wife is present.  Then he's being very good.

Nevertheless, people (and no less Cupid's wife) want some hawtness and nawty on the occasion of Valentine's Day.  Then...?  Even Cupid may find himself shot by his own arrow.

Once There Was a Way....

"Once there was a way...."

The idea has been expressed everywhere from Heraclitus to the Beatles and Keane.  How did Heraclitus (500 BCE) put it?

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
1. p.77. Fr.2

“Although all hold the Word in common, the people
live as if they had a private understanding.”

That's Heraclitus longing for a world that had already disappeared in his day.  It is the same sense remarked in Isaiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we've turned each to his own way."  These sentiments express something of a society detached from a common thread, a binding ideal: the feeling of anomie -- of not belonging to or within one's own society due to the absence of common values, ideals that are shared, are agreed upon, and which are people's common grounding together.  But there is something more: the lost personal, individual attachment to another person and lost moments of connection.  Anomie.

From the Beatles, there is not only "Golden Slumbers," linked above, but this from John Lennon:

Whatever happened to
The love that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
When did we loose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so

Free, as a bird

 And from Keane:

Oh simple thing where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreaming of?

Is it mere nostalgia, as moving as nostalgia may be?  No.  It's deeper; it carries a greater import that speaks to us about our inner lives and identities.  The Romantics called such a thing Sehnsucht, an inconsolable longing, a longing for something or someone beyond ourselves.

C. S. Lewis described Sehnsucht as a longing for something from another world -- or at least a longing for something beyond what this world can satisfy: 

'Ιουλιανπαθω
"O! I desire too much!"

A word similar in meaning is Suadade -- a sense of people, places, moments, deeply loved and tied to our identity, but now gone, missing.  Remembering them isn't mere nostalgia; it's deeper, having, I believe, something to do with our very being -- with our souls.  That is, someone has been so important to us that without that person we are somehow not quite complete, and we remember....  A word said in just the right way, a sound, a look, a song, a smell...and there they are.  Or, rather, there they aren't.  And we feel their absence as we remember.

One more: hiraeth (from Welsh: hir, "long" and aeth, "sorrow, grief").  It connotes a homesickness, a longing for a home or a person that is no more or, as someone put it, "which maybe never was."  It is for something "irretrievably lost"; one Welsh language official said, "It’s a kind of longing for a person, a place or a time that you can’t get back to, a kind of unattainable longing" (Brosschot).

As author, J. L. Carr put it in his remarkable novel A Month in the Country,

     We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever -- the way things looked, [...] a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (104)

Hiraeth can also denote a longing for the past.  That is most certainly what Tennyson called his "passion of the past," expressed in his poem "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

All the above lyrics -- song or poetry -- carry a sense of hiraeth, Suadade and Sehnsucht.  There are others.

 Vianney's song, Pas La:

 

 En Francais:

Je suis une cruche,
percée de plus,
j’ai la peau craquelée
depuis toi, desséchée
Quand vient la lune
et le vent frais,
par habitude,
j’te cherche sur le canapé

mais t’es pas là, mais t’es où?
mais t’es ou ? (pas là, pas là pas là…)

Part of his (translated) lyrics:

I am a broken jar
totally in holes
My skin is cracking
since you faded away
when the moon shows up
and I feel a cold wind
I am still searching [for] you laying on the sofa

But you're not here, where are you then?
but where are you? (not here, not here, not here)

The past is a struggle: it's loaded with all sorts of things that have carried significant import into our present condition, the way we think now about things (even as opposed to how we used to think about them).  There are things back there we idealize, things we also dismiss as irrelevant...but perhaps shouldn't.  The Germans have a funny word here: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: "the trouble you go through when trying to come to terms with the past."

What does it all mean? What doesn't it mean?  Here are meanings beyond mere "feelings" -- here are signficances to our beings past and present.  We cannot explain them: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet.   And yet we come against them (as I wrote elsewhere about time [LINK]).  "Here, there, and everywhere" -- we are reminded....

~~~~~~~~~~~

 Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. Penguin, 2000.

Pierre: It Wasn't Paris

 Pierre

Pierre was one of my great uncles, brother to my grandfather.  It is said that he had restless feet, and after serving in the First World War, he would disappear for some years and then suddenly reappear.

I understand the question that troubled some people about this well-loved uncle (and about other young men who went to France during the war), but it was a relatively shallow question: "How you going to keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?" -- as the WWI song put it.  The real question was probably a bit deeper for Pierre as it was for other soldiers returning home.  It wasn't Paris, where they spent some leave time -- with the wine, women, and song -- that caused them to be unsettled when they returned home from war.

Pierre enlisted the day after the US declared war on Germany.  One record states that he was the first in his community to enlist and "probably the first in his county"(Pocahontas Record) -- and the day he enlisted was his birthday: 15 April 1917.  Certainly he was, like so many young men of the First World War, tied up with ambition, ardent dreams of "some desperate glory" as one poet said, and...he wanted adventure.  Adventure, he may have thought -- like most of us have thought -- would come easily to hand, light up life like a carnival, and then leave us to return home to settle down.

Then there were the trenches, the shelling, the machine guns, and the friends whom one saw fall -- the friends that one survived.  So Pierre didn't come home with the same fireworks in his mind that most Americans saw on the 4th of July.  The fireworks he saw recalled a different reality.

He was in the Vosges where the German army had long before established trenches in the mountains.  Pierre's unit, at this time under command of the French, was sent to hold the line in the Gerardmer sector, in the mountain pass of Schlucht (Col de la Schlucht).

 Col de la Schlucht: Now a Ski Resort.... (source: Michelin)

One unit history has it that, among many other things they did, the German artillery shelled the American field kitchens that had been set up by some fresh-water streams, knowing that they could kill their enemy as they came to get water and cook food for their men.  Dastardly -- but it was war as it is now or at any other time.... In a game of kill-or-be-killed, who has ever played nice?  War isn't like that despite the so-many rules of engagement set up by politicians well behind the lines.

French (red) and German (blue) Lines in the Schlucht (Pierreswesternfront)

His unit, Company C of the 11th Infantry Regiment, was pulled back briefly, put into further training, and then sent (now strictly under American instead of French command) into the Meuse-Argonne while that battle was raging.  He spent the last days of the war pursuing the Germans in their retreat, up to the 11th Nov., the Armistice.  One event during this time involved his company moving to the east, swimming the Loison river, and emerging to capture the French village of Jamtez from the Germans.

The French Village of Jametz, East of the Loison River (Google Maps)

 

Jametz, France August 2014 (Source: Author)

On 11 July 1918, Pierre had written to his mother (note: brackets indicate my editions/guesses to somewhat garbled text):

My last letter was written just before entering the trenches the first time. Since then we have been in the trenches most of the time. Our first trip was in a different sector than we now hold. We spent our first period there [and then] were relieved and brought directly here so we have really spent most of that time in the trenches. Will be glad when we are relieved and taken back for a rest.  Trench life is not so bad where there is lots going on to [provide] plenty of excitement. We have had a real time with rats in the dug out. They are braver than any Huns that ever lived and there is sure some army of them. There are a million things I would like to tell you about but will have to wait until I return. I hope that won't be long, for the sooner we lick the Germans and get back to the good old States the better we all will feel.  I hope Gen. Pershing ... is right when he said it was either "heaven, hell or Ho-boken by winter." (Pocahontas Record 10 Nov. 1938, p. 16)

 Pierre continued his description of events in another letter to his father:

Aug. 9, 1918  Dear Dad:  Am out of the ditches now for a few days. Was relieved the sixth. Twas an awful night raining and dark as hell. The artillery and machine guns were very active right at the time our relief came in. I could hardly talk loud enough to make the fellows relieving me understand the orders of the sector. But at last I got them straightened out, ...I got my platoon together and started out. Well I hadn't gone over three hundred yards before half of them were lost. It took some little time to find them. And when I got them back, I had every one take hold of hands and follow me one behind the other. That way we got along pretty well but t'was 2:30 a. m. before we made it out. We spent ten days in the trenches this trip.  Our worst trouble is going in and out and of course moving from place to place. I'll tell you it takes guts to put your old pack on your back which consists of all a man's belongings and hit out down the road. There has been times when I'd think I couldn't take another step but I'd always reach our destination and I suppose I could go much farther if necessary. There's no use telling if [it's as hard a life as we think. It's tough not to think of it all the time in war.]  And after we get a good meal and a little rest we forget it all and are ready to start again.  We get good treatment and good eats so that is all that a man can expect at a time and a place like this. In other words we are getting along fine. (ibid.)

Shifting men, who get lost in the maze of trenches at night under bombardment and machine gun fire....  Yes, well: the effects don't soon wear off.  It was the American author and WWI ambulance driver Malcolm Cowley who perhaps best described the lasting effects:

We didn't want to be slackers, embusques. The war created in young men a thirst for abstract danger, not suffered for a cause but courted for itself; if later they believed in the cause, it was partly in recognition of the danger it conferred on them. Danger was a relief from boredom, a stimulus to the emotions, a color mixed with all others to make them brighter.  There were moments in France when the senses were immeasurably sharpened by the thought of dying next day, or possibly next week.  The trees were green, not like ordinary trees, but like trees in the still moment before a hurricane; the sky was a special and ineffable blue; the grass smelled of life itself; the image of death mingled together into a keen, precarious delight. (Exile's Return p. 42).

"How you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen Par-ee?"  It's not Paris that made them restless.  It's what lies between you in Paris on leave and your buddies left dead in the fields.

Hemingway put it this way, using an old barn and a grove of hemlock as metaphors for lost innocence:

We had lain in hay and talked and shot sparrows with an air rifle when they perched in the triangle cut high up in the wall of the barn.  The barn was gone now and one year they had cut the hemlock woods and there were only stumps, dried tree-tops, branches and fireweed where the woods had been.  You could not go back. (Farewell to Arms, qtd in Cowley p. 46).

The beginning of next month, August 2014, marks the centenary of the beginning of WWI.  The more we understand about it, the more we will understand Pierre's -- and other veterans' -- seemingly odd behaviors, their silence about the war, their restless feet, their need to sit in a room facing the door, what they see sometimes when they stare, and their simple desire for normalcy.

Merci, Pierre.  You carried the weight of trying to set a portion of civilization right.  And you carried the loss of friends.  It was a lot of weight to carry in silence because no one -- other than another veteran -- could quite understand it.

Time and Again

Once upon a Doorstep....was a Room with a View (upper left)

Walking down the street the other day, I  passed this doorway -- 7 Bedford Place.  Looking up and thinking back, I calculated that it was exactly 30 years ago as a graduate student in London I stayed at this place.  What tranquil hours I spent absorbed in my books in the room, upper left.

Tall Georgian Windows at 7 Bedford Pl.

Beyond reading my books, I was writing in my journal to help crystallize my fuzzy ideas, researching, and writing papers on English history, art, architecture, literature, theatre....  Much time was spent over William Blake, and when an afternoon grew drowsy, I had only to step down the street toward Bloomsbury Square, round the corner to the British Museum, and there find -- among a million other objects of soul-inspiring interest -- originals of Blake's art.  Very handy, that, when writing on the relations between Blake's spiritual vision, his art, and his poetry.  But there were other writers, among them one who worked in Bloomsbury at Faber, whose door was just across Russell Square -- T. S. Eliot:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
.     .     .     .     .
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Indeed, there was time enough.  I value those idyllic days and hours even though I have come to realize that all along I had been preparing my answers to face the questions that I myself, as well as others, dropped on my plate over these past 30 years.

Bear with a little nostalgia?  There was Kurt -- a student/worker at Number 7: when he got free from work late at night, he and I would dash to Holborn tube station, head through two other underground lines to St. Paul's, rush round the back of St. Paul's through the churchyard, across roads dotted with traffic, to the Samuel Pepys' -- a pub in an old, Dickensian-age warehouse on the river -- arriving just in time for a pint or two of Bass Ale on the balcony and some talk over the glimmering lights on the Thames before the pub closed up for the night.

And there was the evening when Peter O'Toole played Professor Higgins to Jackie Smith-Wood's Eliza at the Shaftesbury Theatre.  A young woman-acquaintance joined me, and we delighted in the production -- a liquefied O'Toole nearly slopped himself off the edge of the stage, but was of course still brilliantly acting!

                             (Guardian)                                                (Getty)

(myfavoritepeterotoole.tumblr.com)

And the great John Thaw was playing Eliza's father long before he played Morse.  After the play, I well remember, there was meaningful conversation over pasta in Sicilian Avenue.

Another night there were two salesmen, Mr. Glasgow and Mr. Exeter -- and then a woman who, swaying to the cosmic forces, arrived at the Swan in Cosmo Place to lead us to an overwhelming answer...[Link].

And there was a pigeon (in London?!) who wandered from the balcony into my room through the floor-to-ceiling window while I was writing.  How long he'd been there, who knows?  Upon hearing a noise, I turned, spied him, and invited him to leave.  Deft was his turn and stately his gait as he sauntered out onto the balcony to look back but once and then fly off -- apparently a statue nearby hadn't quite enough poop on its head already.

And the Tube cars still had wooden slats on the floors.

Wooden Floor Slats on the Piccadilly Line (1984)

That was a time.  And again?

When, years later, I brought my students to London -- once, here, to 7 Bedford Place -- I hoped they might try to find their own London, begin finding a face to meet the faces that they'd meet -- if they hadn't already begun.  My hopes were they'd begin to ask and to answer questions for and of themselves, to see what's on the plate.  The poets offer some clues.  The painters offer some as well.  The theatre offers some help.  Studying history offers some direction.  Not least, the pub can offer some help -- if you've both good company and conversation.  Honesty about questions and answers is of the greatest help.

I've mentioned elsewhere in this blog that much of what London was in 1984 is gone -- but much more of it, I'm realizing, is still intact.  A great deal of it remains the same despite being some centuries old -- like Number 7.

It certainly remains, both as it was in 1984 and as it is now, deeply set within me.