Freedom

At JFK, on the way back from Italy, eager for something to fill a six-hour plane ride across the country (I had already endured seven hours crossing the Mediterranean and the Atlantic without any reading material), I picked up Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.  I had been meaning to read The Corrections for a long time but just hadn’t gotten around to it. However, that title wasn’t in stock at Hudson News in Terminal 8 so the new novel was a stand-in.  I slowly warmed to it and appreciated that one of the primary characters in this utterly mainstream novel was obsessed with the issue of population control.  Way back in college I wrote a paper on how India needed to get its population growth under control in order to start the development engine, because to develop, you need to create a surplus.  You first have to get a toehold beyond subsistence.  Back in the late 60s and early 70s there was plenty of talk about zero population growth (ZPG) even though there were only about 2.5 billion people on the planet then and we weren't facing the environmental depredations we are now, but around the end of the 70s the subject went silent.  People’s eyes started to glaze over if you brought it up, and they hurriedly changed the subject.  It seemed to have become a taboo concept, maybe because people of my generation were then into their child-bearing and child-rearing years and consequently their brains were being overridden by a combination of their instincts and hormones, plus social expectations. They were too busy doing what they were programmed to do by nature and the social order.  Now world population is up to 7.5 billion, three times what it was back then, and we are facing some pretty serious consequences. 

Just before the trip I’d remarked to a couple of people about how this issue had been swept under the rug, no one talked about it in public anymore, which is bizarre considering that it’s the root of all our environmental problems.  I mean, so long as the human population continues to expand at the current rate (thirteen million a month of net gain, according to Franzen), any green efforts amount to little more than pissing into the wind.  Conversely if we could stabilize or, better yet, reduce it, those efforts would lose some of their urgency.  And yet, there has been so little public discussion of this issue. 

Franzen has a theory as to why: capitalism cannot contemplate the stabilization of population because its ideology relies on the assumption of infinite growth, first of capital, and to support that, markets, and therefore, ultimately,  population.  But you don’t have to think about this very much to see that it’s an untenable proposition.  You can’t have infinite growth in a finite world.  This is a piece of the old, outdated notion about the inexhaustibility of nature. 

Because of its implacable and impractical opposition to birth control as a way to get a handle on population growth, the Catholic Church has made itself the villain of this story.  

An issue related to this which Franzen does not raise is Free Death.  The Catholic Church plays an evil role here too, in its opposition to suicide.  When will the individual finally gain rights and control over his or her own life?  When will that happen?  I get exasperated whenever the issue of suicide barriers for the Golden Gate Bridge is brought up.  What gives some people the idea that they should have the ultimate say over whether someone else gets to die or not?  Each person’s life should belong to him or her alone, not to the state, or the society, or the church, or the family, or the neighbors; and each individual should be able to die whenever they choose.  We may not agree with their choice, we may try to talk them out of it, but ultimately it’s not our decision to make.  We don’t know how it feels, being them.  Both as a mercy for every individual and for the sake of humanity as a whole, suicide should be made easier, not more difficult.  But although the mainstream may be coming back to ZPG, I guess it hasn’t come around to this, yet.

Sicilian Cuisine

I’ve been asked why I did not say more in the Sicily post about the food.  It’s a worthy topic. 

We tend to think that portions in the US are large, that Americans are big eaters, and while it’s true that you do not see many obese Sicilians, it’s hard to understand why not when you find that their meals normally consist of four courses.  First you have an appetizer (antipasto), then a pasta course (prima piati), then a meat or fish course (secondi piati), and finally a dessert, with a salad course possibly thrown in before dessert at the diner’s discretion, and finishing up with an espresso.  Along with this you normally would have at least one bottle of wine, if there are two of you.  I could never get through more than three courses, and even then I was utterly stuffed.  So how do they do it?  I have no idea.  I watched a young Italian couple at La Botte in Cefalu go through all four courses and two bottles of wine and look none the worse for it, and all I can say is that they took their time.  They ate slowly, amongst a lot of talking and laughing, and after each course they exited the restaurant for a smoke break, taking their glasses of wine with them.  By contrast, Americans tend to wolf their food in a rush, barely tasting it, as if they can’t wait to choke it down and move on to the next activity.  The Italians (this is not exclusive to Sicily) linger over each plate, savoring it, mixing it with leisurely conversation.  At a restaurant in the States it’s all about turnover.  They rush you through the meal so that they can move you out and seat someone else at your table.  The goal is to get at least three, preferably four, seatings in an evening at each table.  At a restaurant anywhere in Italy you are expected to take two or three hours to dine.  Essentially, once you have been seated, you own that table for the evening.  You can sit there until closing time and no one will bother you.  The waiter would never dream of bringing the check before you ask for it.

The fact is, I had very high expectations for the food in Sicily and was just a wee bit disappointed.  Not that I had a bad meal there, anywhere.  In fact I had some very good ones.  A pesto pasta lunch in Trapani (Taberna Ai Lumi) comes to mind, as well as two dinners in Syracuse, one at an outdoor café (Taberna Sveva) near the fort in Ortygia that included a delicious pasta with fresh anchovies (nothing at all like the fishy, salty, canned anchovies you get in the States) known as spaghetti alle Siracusa and a mixed seafood plate, plus an outstanding fresh cannolo for dessert; another at a restaurant (Jonico) on the coast northeast of Ortygia, where I had smoked salmon, tuna, and swordfish as an appetizer, spaghetti alle Siracusa (again!) for prima piati, and sea bass and tuna for the main course.  In Cefalu I had an excellent meal at La Botte that included marinated anchovies for antipasto, puchetti tonne for prima piati, and an unknown catch of the day with mussels for secondi piati and it was all fabulous.  You’ll never have fresher fish and, in fact, I ate only seafood, no meat, while there, because there is an assortment of Mediterranean fish to be had that you simply cannot get in the States.  Nevertheless, despite all this, I still hold with Naples as the capital of Italian cuisine.  The best pizza by far is there; you could eat the crust by itself and still think it was better than any pizza you’d ever had anywhere else.  The best espresso, the best sfogliatelle; you name it, Naples has the best.  Well, except maybe for spaghetti alle Siracusa….

Sicily

                      
                                              The temple at Segesta

The trip to Sicily got off to a shaky start when my EasyJet from Rome encountered heavy winds coming into Palermo and bounced from wheel to wheel on the landing, prompting the passengers to applaud in gratitude when it finally settled onto both and braked toward the gate.  Rain started falling as I was pulling into Castellammare del Golfo, about 30 kilometers west of the airport, in my rented Fiat (60 percent of the cars on the road in Sicily were Italian—Fiats, Lancias, Alfa Romeos—and I wanted to go native) and by the time I found my hotel and got established in my room, it was pouring.  It was disheartening when I considered that California, when I’d left, had been basking in a beautiful Indian summer.  And even more so when I started to walk to a nearby restaurant through the thunder and lightening with only a flimsy compact umbrella that was almost useless in the high winds and discovered that the street I’d driven through to get to the hotel only a few minutes before now hosted a raging torrent that, if I were to step into it, would have instantly swept me out into the Tyrrhenian Sea.  Consequently I was forced to take a long route around to find a bridge over the water rushing down from the mountains behind the town, and by the time I reached the restaurant I was soaked.  But some fresh grilled fish brightened my mood somewhat and by the time I finished and was sipping an espresso the rain had begun to taper off. 

The next day dawned bright and sunny and I set off for the ruins at Segesta.  I nosed out of town along a narrow concrete road that didn’t look at all like a highway and was soon in a rural landscape of small farms and rustic stone shacks that gradually spread out as the road narrowed to little more than one lane.  The rain had left huge puddles that at times threatened to swallow the road entirely and after not seeing any other traffic for a while I began to wonder if the directions of the street vendor I’d consulted just outside of town were accurate.  I went through a valley where I could see the autostrada on stilts about sixty or seventy feet over my head (the autostrada in Sicily, I learned, is nearly always either on stilts or in a tunnel), but it was too inaccessible to give me much comfort.  Finally I came up on a minivan and followed it, with some relief, into a rough stone and gravel parking lot.  From there I walked up some fairly steep steps to the temple. 

                                                       Selinunte
                                          

There are three major temple sites in Sicily: Segesta, Selinunte, and Agrigento; plus a couple of theaters, at Syracuse and Taormina.  The temple in Syracuse (Archimedes home town) has been incorporated into the Duomo in Ortygia, the old town, in the typical way the Italians have of almost seamlessly blending the old and the new.  Of the two theaters, the one at Syracuse is the more impressive, just for its sheer size and the way it spreads out on a hillside overlooking the sea.  With seating for 15,000, it was among the largest theaters in all of Magna Graecia.  Aeschylus’ tragedy “The Persians” premiered there and it is said that the playwright was on site for the event.  The theater in Taormina is smaller, and the seats have a steeper slant, as is required by the steeper hillside on which it is set.  Much of the Greek structure was built over by the Romans using red brick, and more recently a stage and first tier of seating were added in wood to make it more functional.  A chamber group was playing there when I visited.  The scenery buildings added by the Romans have partially collapsed to reveal a spectacular view of the coastline and the Ionian Sea below (Taormina is on Sicily’s east coast).  Taormina is, of course, noted for its views, and has been a tourist destination since the late nineteenth century on that account. 

                                              The theater at Syracuse

Of the temples I preferred Segesta, for its dramatic isolated setting on a gentle hillside, backed by a small gorge, and also because it’s perhaps the best preserved Doric temple in the world and, unlike the temples at Paestum, in the Campania region of Italy, you can actually walk around inside it.  The temple of Hera at Selinunte is not nearly so well preserved.  In fact, it was re-erected in the last century (because there are no right angles in a Doric temple, every piece has one, and only one, correct location).  Two temples that once stood beside it remain in ruins, reduced to piles of fractured columns and broken rock, with one upright column protruding from the wreckage.  Were these two also to be reconstructed, the three together would indeed present a splendid sight.  At Agrigento there are at least seven temples in various states of disrepair in the valley below the modern town.  I say “at least” because excavation of the area is far from complete.  The best preserved is the Temple of Concord, built in the fifth century B.C.  It was spared destruction because about a thousand years later it was consecrated as a Christian Church.  The next best is the Temple of Hera, with thirty columns still standing, although only sixteen still have their capitals.  The Temple of Heracles, cited by ancient writers as being one of the most beautiful in the world at the time, is today reduced to only nine standing columns, none with intact capitals, those having been re-erected early in the last century.  The project was given up after a worker lost his life in the effort.  The Temple of Olympian Zeus was the largest Doric building ever built.  It is unusual in that it did not have free-standing columns but only demi-columns incorporated into a solid wall.   It was brought down by earthquakes, after which the stones were looted, so little of it remains today but the foundation.  The other examples are mere scraps.  Agrigento is the place where you can experience most fully the juxtaposition of the starkly ancient and the busy modern in violent contrast, since the living town is visible from the archeological site.

                      
The Temple of Concord with the modern town of Agrigento in the background

 Everyone knows that the ancient Greeks founded Western Civilization, but, even more importantly, they invented the root and basis of Western Civilization: the individual.  This is probably the greatest human invention.  Philosophy depends on an individual consciousness confronting the conundrum of existence, something that hadn’t really existed before the Greeks.  How fitting, then, that the letter “I” looks like a Doric column.  The Doric Temple represents a group of individuals voluntarily joining together to form a community.  Previously, human architecture, insofar as it had got beyond mere necessity, had been all about monumentality, an expression of the concentration of power.  But the Greeks brought something new to the table, an aesthetic quality.  There is monumentality in a Doric temple, to be sure, yet there is also an aspiration of lightness, an airiness that makes the building seem to float, to hover above the ground.  The Greeks were the first people to worship not just power, but beauty as well.  They were a people of genius who created more lasting gifts to humanity in a shorter time than any other culture.  The Romans spent a thousand years imitating them and we still have things to learn from them; namely, the secret of so much originality, so many great individuals. 

                                           The theater at Taormina

Given what a fan I was of the Classical Greeks in my youth, it’s surprising that I didn’t visit Sicily on my first, post-graduate trip to Europe along with Greece proper (where I spent five months), seeing as how it was a kind of annex of Classical Greece and I had plenty of time to do it.  Perhaps it was because on that first trip I was looking more for an intangible spirit of place than for any specific archeological site or set of ruins (except of course for the Acropolis and Delphi).  But in fact it took me quite a while to realize that, aside from the Parthenon, the best Classical sites are not in Greece.  What is more, in the colonies Greek architects showed more flair for innovation and experimentation.  It was only four years ago that I saw Paestum for the first time, a magnificent site preserved by an accident of nature (a change in drainage patterns turned the area into a malarial swamp that kept looters away for centuries) that I had passed right by on that first trip so many years ago.  I had been dimly aware of its existence at the time, but not of its grandeur.  There are three nearly intact temples there, two dedicated to Hera, and one to Athena.  I was lucky enough to see it on a day when it was supposed to be closed for a conference, so it was virtually deserted.  You could say that the trip to Sicily was an extension or outgrowth of the Paestum experience. 

                            The second temple of Hera at Paestum

After my visit to Segesta, I drove on to Trapani, on the west coast, where I found that all the hotels were full.  The reason was that, while I had been swimming to the restaurant in Castellammare, another plane trying to land at the Palermo airport had been blown off the runway by the high winds.  No one had been hurt but the airport was closed for 24 hours and consequently no one could get out.  I called hotels all around the vicinity, even the one I had stayed at the night before in Castellammare, but everything was full.  I thought I might have to sleep in the car.  In desperation I took the road out of town north along the coast, and drove until I spotted a sign that said “Restaurant-Hotel.”  To my relief, they had a room, and it even had a glancing view of the sea, where a strong, steady wind was blowing ranks of restless waves at it.  After this, the trip got on a firm footing and there were no more unpleasant surprises.     

It’s said that the Sicilians are more aggressive drivers than mainland Italians.  I don’t know if that’s true, but I can tell you that you want to avoid driving in the cities unless you enjoy playing bumper cars with real cars.  There is no concept of lanes or right of way.  I say that based only on a brief brush with the traffic in Palermo.  I bypassed Catania, the second largest city and confined my driving in Syracuse, the third largest city, to finding a hotel, in the course of which I discovered the extra challenge of that city is that there are no street signs. After that I hired a driver, Salvatore, to take me everywhere I wanted to go.  The thing is, they are operating smaller cars on smaller roads, so everything is stepped down, and all maneuvering is at closer tolerances than we are used to in the States.  I can't tell you how many times I thought I was going to lose a mirror.  Because the roads are so narrow and so crowded with parked cars (it’s hard to believe some of the places they park), and with moving cars, motorcycles, motor scooters, bicycles and pedestrians coming at you from every possible direction, collisions tend to be more frequent than in the States, but gentler.  However, I still managed to mostly avoid them, except for a bus clipping me on one of the switchbacks going up to Taormina.  The same thing happened to me on the Amalfi coast, coming back from Paestum.  The buses are just way too big for the roads they’re being driven on. 

                                                        Cefalu

Best beach town was Cefalu, on the north coast.  Boats leave for the Aeolian islands from there and I wanted to make it to Salina, where Il Postino was filmed, but in a 2-week trip there just wasn’t time to see everything, and the ruins were my priority.  Plus this was toward the end of the trip and I needed to slow down and relax a little, kick back for some beach time.  The water was refreshingly cool and clear.  The tourists were mostly German; very few Americans.  Brush up on your Italian; not many Sicilians speak English.  If you do, and if you can coax them out of their cars, you're liable to find they can be very friendly and helpful