Salon.com > Eric Weinberger

Destination: The Alps

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 11:00:00 +0000

If, like Gore Vidal, you think of Hemingway as humorless, you might look again at this late passage in "A Farewell to Arms" (1929) where two border officials compete for the attention of a foreign couple, arguing over which idyllic Swiss resort offers the best winter sport: Italian-speaking Locarno, where they are standing, or Francophone Montreux, on the eastern end of Lake Geneva where the little Montreux-Oberland Bernois railway rises steeply above the town and runs deep into the Alps, toward Gstaad. The comedy anticipates the sorts of polite hostile exchanges one would later find in Beckett and Pinter. In Montreux, says the one official, there are possibilities for "luge-ing," adding perhaps unnecessarily, "Luge-ing is certainly winter sport." His colleague turns to the foreigner: "Is luge-ing your idea of winter sport, sir? I tell you you would be very comfortable here in Locarno." It continues:

"The gentleman has expressed a wish to go to Montreux."

"What is luge-ing"? I asked.

"You see he has never even heard of luge-ing!" That meant a great deal to the second official. He was pleased by that.

"Luge-ing," said the first official, "is tobogganing."

Homage to Blogalonia

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:17:00 +0000

At the George Orwell centenary conference at Wellesley College in May, I began a short talk by quoting perhaps the most boring piece of writing by Orwell that I know:

"I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines -- they have to be retrospective, unfortunately -- in praise of the Woolworth's Rose.

"In the good days when nothing in Woolworth's cost over sixpence, one of their best lines was their rose bushes. They were always very young plants, but they came into bloom in their second year, and I don't think I ever had one die on me. Their chief interest was that they were never, or very seldom, what they claimed to be on their labels. One that I bought for a Dorothy Perkins turned out to be a beautiful little white rose with a yellow heart, one of the finest ramblers I have ever seen. A polyantha rose labelled yellow turned out to be deep red. Another, bought for an Albertine, was like an Albertine, but more double, and gave astonishing masses of blossom. These roses had all the interest of a surprise packet, and there was always the chance that you might happen upon a new variety which you would have the right to name John Smithii or something of that kind."

Rotten kid

Wed, 17 Jul 2002 19:30:00 +0000

So John Walker Lindh has given up without a fight, just as, apparently, he did in Afghanistan. Of course, based on what we know about his time abroad, he never had any fight in him -- as opposed to, say, a real Taliban or Qaida warrior -- which should have told his prosecutors, or any American paying attention, that he was never a threat to begin with. And yet the government seems strangely pleased with itself for having put him away for 20 years, or as Attorney General John Ashcroft has noted, with typical un-Christian glee, "nearly as long as he has been alive."

How to explain the obsessive interest of men like Ashcroft in the minor case of criminal jurisprudence that is John Walker Lindh? It is shocking, really, how many powerful men, all of them old enough to be his father, have it in for Walker. Of course it is just that fact -- their power and prestige, their age vs. his -- that explains it: They see in Walker their own renegade son, real or imagined, the kind of elusive, questioning young man whose deep suspicion of their motives and accomplishments -- as congressmen, commentators, law professors or Cabinet secretaries -- stands as an unforgivable personal rebuke.