Category: Reading

35. Václav Cílek, To Breathe With Birds: A Book of Landscapes

I discovered Václav Cílek’s To Breathe With Birds: A Book of Landscapes through Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, where the last essay, “Bees of the Invisible,” is mentioned. I had read that essay, but not the rest of the book until the past week. What a strange book! Odd and oddly compelling.

Cílek is a climatologist and a geologist as well as an essayist, and these essays tend to bring together the geology of Czechia (where Cílek lives) and the history that’s been influenced by that geology. What’s under the ground influences what happens on the surface. But Cílek is also fascinated by sacred stories and legends (the more local, the better), and sometimes an essay will move between science and mythology quickly. The model for this kind of movement might be Johannes Kepler’s essay about snowflakes, discussed here in “The Six-Cornered Snowflake,” which also (according to Cílek) brings together rational inquiry, imaginative speculation, and theology. B

ut in Cílek’s writing, this mixture isn’t just thematic. In “Places from the Other Side,” for instance, Cílek leaps from a travelogue about different places in the Sudetenland to a reconfiguration of himself as vapour, a rock in a stream, “a green light, a willow above the river,” “beeches on the banks.” He realizes that the bears in the castle moat are actually humans who only pretend to be bears when they’re being observed by people. “We travel to places like Český Krumlov because certain ideas occur only in particular regions and places,” he concludes. Aside from emphasizing the effects places have on us, and we have in them, the point seems to be that the world exceeds all of our interpretative frameworks—scientific, mythological, imaginative—and so we need all of them to comprehend what’s around us.

Cílek also tends to make pronouncements, reminding me of Gaston Bachelard, among others. It’s a peculiarly European way of writing, which one either finds charming or annoying, depending on one’s mood. (There—a pronouncement! You don’t have to be European to play that game.)

Sometimes the essays have a surprising, even mysterious, structure. “Walking Through a Landscape” starts out with a relatively common idea about walking and place: moving through rural places on foot is calming, and we apprehend the land’s “indefinite sanctity” and the history of human connections with it. Then, in the second paragraph, it takes up dwarves (which apparently have a literal existence here) as the spirit protectors of houses. The last two paragraphs (it’s a short essay) argue that gardening creates a community that brings together the human and the more-than-human—including dwarves. But other essays here are less, well, fanciful. The one about the history of asphalt as the dominant modern material is surprising and soberly researched. I wish I’d read it while I was working on Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Not that one mode is better than the other: the surreal and the straightforward are both welcome. And there’s a lot of surrealism here: “The Standard Central Bohemian Vision”brings together visions, folktales, and dreams about the dead.

I’ve been at a conference on pilgrimage this week, and I’ve been thinking about “Bees of the Invisible,” in which Cílek sets out a series of rules for wayfaring. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane describes similar rules, but he connects them to the notion of “improvised pilgrimage.” What links wayfaring and pilgrimage? An online Czech dictionary provides the explanation: the Czech word “poutník” translates as both wayfarer, traveller, journeyer, and pilgrim. Other essays here consider different pilgrimages: to Maková hora (Poppy Mountain), to a complex of Christian buildings on Svatá hora (Holy Mountain). On those examples, the translator, Evan W. Mellander, uses the term “pilgrimage,” but all of the journeys here, whatever their destinations, could be seen as improvised pilgrimages. When Cílek describes himself, in “Bees of the Invisible,” as “a wayfarer, not a conqueror,” he could also be calling himself a pilgrim. The places he visits are all sacred in one way or another, although he argues that some places are more sacred than others. Their loss—through urbanization, abandonment, the construction of mines or nuclear power plants—therefore affects him deeply. Even the destruction of the geodiversity of the world (the richness of its subterranean strata) upsets him just as much as the loss of ecodiversity. That makes sense: he’s a geologist, after all. I want to return to this strange book and explore its oddnesses. I wonder what else Cílek has written that’s been translated into English.

34. Matthew Anderson, Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia

I’ve written about Matthew Anderson’s Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia here before (about a year ago, in fact), and as preparation for the pilgrimage conference I mentioned in my last post, I reread it last week. I have more things to say about it (rereading typically reveals something new about even a book you know well, in my experience), but I don’t want to scoop myself. Let me just say that Someone Else’s Saint is thoughtful and nuanced, and that Anderson is a gentle and learned guide.

33. Robert Twigger, Walking the Great North Line: From Stonehenge to Lindisfarne to (kind of) Discover the Mysteries of Our Ancient Past

I wish I could remember who recommended Robert Twigger’s Walking the Great North Line to me. I’d like to thank whoever it was publicly, for two reasons: I hadn’t heard of it until that person told me about it, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Twigger, the author of a dozen books, realized one day that many ancient sacred sites in England, including Stonehenge and Avebury Circle, are arranged on a line leading north from Christchurch on the south coast to the Isle of Lindisfarne, close to the Scottish border. He decided to make a walking pilgrimage along that line, mostly alone but sometimes accompanied by friends, as a way of learning more. The educational process this book reveals is embodied and experiential; by the time he reaches Lindisfarne, Twigger (and his readers) have learned about tribal religions (mostly ancient, mostly in England), the link between sacred places and water (all those holy springs!), the way that a series of religions has been drawn to those places (not, he argues, because they were poaching on their competitors but because those places have something special). He also learns about himself, particularly his timidity when confronted by landowners about his trespassing and its sources, both personal and social.

I learned other things from this book: the strict limits on access to private land in England (stay on the footpath!), how to ford a river, how to stealth camp, what to do when it rains constantly. I’ve always thought that the reuse of sacred sites (and festival dates) was just a form of clever marketing, but the connection between those places and springs of fresh (and sometimes mineralized) water is making me reconsider my sceptical materialism. I don’t agree with his advice about avoiding blisters (oversized boots, in my experience, cause rather than prevent them), but if that works for him, I’m glad.

I’m giving a paper at a pilgrimage conference this week, and Walking the Great North Line helped me get into the right frame of mind. Plus Twigger is an enjoyable narrator, not afraid of revealing his many errors and ridiculousnesses. He might be a fun walking companion, at least for a few days.

An added bonus: he briefly discusses something I’ve been struggling to write about, and that discussion, and his sources, will help me understand my thoughts as I keep trying.

So thanks, friend who recommended this book!

(Edit: it was Joy Hamilton! Eventually I remember things. Thanks, Joy!)

32. Emily M. Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want, by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, has a straightforward thesis: the technology that goes by the name “AI”—a “marketing term,” according to the authors—is a con, “a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone’s pockets.” It’s a form of hype that uses tropes from science fiction to make the technology, and its creators, “appear powerful—if not godlike—in their technical creation.” It’s a technology that doesn’t deliver on promises of its wealthy proponents. Instead, those “well-placed players are poised to accumulate significant wealth from other people’s creative work, personal data, or labor, and replacing quality services with artificial facsimiles.” The infrastructure on which it operates is made from rare-earth minerals and is manufactured with toxic chemicals, used outrageous amounts of water for cooling, and is likely to make decarbonizing our economy impossible. It’s a massive surveillance machine. It encourages managers to fire actual human employees because they figure that AI slop can do the same work more cheaply. (The fact that it can’t doesn’t matter, apparently.) It perpetuates the racism and sexism that’s in its training data. It’s inherently unreliable, generating wrong answers to questions and making the work of research—figuring out which sources are credible and which aren’t—impossible. The investment bubble it’s creating (bigger now than when the book was written) could cause an economic collapse when it pops. And, they argue, it needs to be resisted.

Bender, a computational linguist, and Hanna, the director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, describe generative AI—platforms like ChatGPT and Claude, which run on large language models—“synthetic text extruding machines” which mimic speech but have no intelligence and are incapable of forming a communicative intention. Like ELIZA, the chatbot developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the late 1960s, these platforms fool us into thinking that they’re intelligent, mostly because we’re prone to attributing intelligence to things that seem to have language, the way we see faces in clouds (a phenomenon called pareidolia). Predicting which word follows in a series without knowing what any of the words actually mean isn’t a sign that the machines are thinking or conscious. Besides, we don’t really know what consciousness or intelligence actually are. We don’t have clear definitions of either term that would help us measure the claims of many AI proponents. We’re falling for an illusion, Bender and Hanna argue, and the hype surrounding AI is driven more by FOMO than anything rational.

The AI Con covers a lot of ground. It’s well-researched but approachable, its prose almost breezy. I’m not a fan of generative AI, so I’m prone to agree with its arguments, so in my case, Bender and Hanna are preaching to the choir. Still, they unpack the actual harms this technology is causing while seeing through the hype about its potential risks and putative benefits. Because the technology is developing so rapidly, it’s already a little out of date, even though it was just published last year; the economic and ecological damage AI is causing seems to be worse than the book suggests, and the resistance to generative AI and the data centres on which it runs has exploded in the past six months. Still, Bender and Hanna seem to know what they’re talking about, and The AI Con is a useful corrective against the technological triumphalism and the rhetoric of inevitability that surrounds AI. We see both in our federal government’s AI strategy—and just about everywhere else. I’m glad I read it. The next AI book I’ll tackle will be Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. But that won’t happen right away, mostly because I didn’t bring it with me on this trip. Oh, and also because life’s too short to spend all my energy thinking about AI.

31. Simon Armitage, New Cemetery

There’s a reason Simon Armitage is the UK’s poet laureate: he is, as a Brit might say, bloody marvellous. Exhibit A: New Cemetery. So much is going on in these 100 pages. I’m not quite sure where to start.

Okay, I’ll pick a place: Armitage’s introduction, in which he explains that a field up the hill from his house in a Yorkshire village became a cemetery, and his neighbours objected. Armitage did not. What if the land was sold anyway and became something truly obnoxious, like an industrial park or an Amazon warehouse? Or, from the perspective of 2026, a data centre? There are worse neighbours, he thought. Then came Covid, and then his father’s sudden death, which clearly gutted him. All of this is explored in this book’s poems.

At the same time, Armitage’s other commitments—translations, commissioned books, and general poet laureating—were making it difficult to write other things. The solution was to write these short poems, all of which use the same form: three-line stanzas (tercets is the technical term), with each line indented below the one before. That gives the book an unusual consistency. So does the way each poem is dedicated to a different species of moth. Armitage notes how insect populations are plummeting, taking the starving birds with them—another loss, another kind of death worth mourning. Those common names aren’t titles—the idea always was to leave these poems untitled—but sometimes there’s an odd resonance between the eccentric nomenclature and the poetry.

Along with cemetery, his father, his ecological anxiety, Armitage is sometimes charmingly self-effacing (a national poet laureate could easily go in a more egoistic direction) about his difficulties writing, and sometimes even self-lacerating. He’s also funny and his words often made me stop and reread what I’d just finished reading out of sheer joy and surprise. And, sometimes, I learned something about Armitage. The poem “[Reddish Light Arches],” for instance, laments the death of “[t]he Fall guy.” I’m Armitage’s age (well, six months younger than), and I knew the Manchester band he was referring to, but couldn’t remember the lead singer’s name or when he died. Wikipedia reminds me: Mark E. Smith, the lead singer, songwriter, and only consistent member of the Fall, died of cancer in 2018. But Wikipedia tells me more: Armitage is a lifelong music fan, particularly of the Fall, and the only UK poet laureate who is also a deejay. So the poem, despite its apparently offhand reference to Smith, is about a band Armitage loves, and its final imagining, in the last three stanzas, of Smith’s resurrection goes beyond elegy:

Here’s Smith’s infamous irascibility, his voice like a cawing crow, his lung cancer, his aggression, his music, and Armitage’s deep love for all of it. But also present are the books various dead: those interred in the cemetery up the road, but also Armitage’s father, whose death overshadows the second half of New Cemetery.

I want to give a sense of how Armitage writes about the landscape, particularly the cemetery, but it’s hard to pick just one poem. Here’s “[Orange Footman],” chosen more or less at random, since singling one poem out of all these bangers feels wrong:

Here’s a photo, one of my copy’s title page, inscribed by the author, who was the keynote speaker at the conference in Leeds I’m flying home from:

He seems to have misspelled my name, a detail which inspired this poem. It tries to imitate Armitage’s form, and his reliance on half-rhymes and alliteration, and while it might not be very good (I hesitate to include it here), it exists, which means that I can keep working on it:

The Famous Poet Signed his Book

but he seems
             to have misspelled
                       my name,

perhaps because 
             he misheard 
                       it (I’m told

I mumble) or maybe
            he’s fed up with 
                       the poetry dog 

and pony show, the claims 
             on his time, big and small,
                        the lectures and commissions,

tours and interviews, 
              and the grinning, nervous 
                        fans who line up waving

hardcovers and paperbacks 
              and babbling garbled praise, 
                        when he’d prefer 

wrestling rhymes beneath the skylight
              in his attic room, his pen, the village
                        quiet, and a cooling cup of tea.

30. Sarah Tolmie, All the Horses of Iceland

I’m not sure how All the Wild Horses of Iceland came into my possession—I suspect my friend Tanis MacDonald sent it to me in trade for some books about walking, because there’s a postcard from her tucked inside—but I’m glad it did, and that I read it near the end of my trip to England, since it’s partly about the difficulties of travelling across continents a thousand years ago. Eyvind of Eyri, the protagonist of the story our unnamed narrator tells, travels from Iceland to somewhere in Central Asia and back, and his remarkable and life-changing story makes the small problems of contemporary travel (missed trains, airline food) seem very small indeed.

I was impressed by the way Tolmie imagines Eyvind’s world, which is so dramatically different from ours, in a way that feels completely believable. This is a kind of fantasy, of course, but it has a dense texture and heft. I know “heft” suggests a long book, which this isn’t—it’s short enough that I read most of it over dinner last night—but I can’t find another word that describes its serious evocation of historical otherness. So many people love fantasy fiction, and although there are no elves or wizards here, that otherness, that strangeness, ought to appeal to those readers. At the same time, though, there’s a complexity and nuance here. No clashes between good and evil, no moral absolutes, just people navigating events and obstacles they didn’t choose.

And the writing! What a voice. I wish I could write like this. No single quotation is likely to give you a sense of what the prose is like, particularly because of the way Tolmie immerses us in Eyvind’s world. A quotation from the middle of the book wouldn’t make sense; you’ve got to begin at the beginning, slowly developing a feeling for this alien but recognizable environment.

The internet tells me that All the Horses of Iceland made the New York Times list of the best books of 2022. It deserves that honour.

So, Tanis, if you read this, thanks for the book, and I wish I’d read it sooner.

27. Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma

I brought Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma with me on this trip because a) it’s been on my desk for ages, and b) I live in a flat place (or so I thought, but not according to Masud’s use of that term), and c) I heard that it’s a book about walking. I’m happy I did. A Flat Place is a beautifully written, thoughtful articulation of living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). That’s not all this book is about, but it’s the beginning of a description of the territory it explores.

For Masud, literal flat places—she lives in UK, and the flat places she visits are the fens of Cambridgeshire, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney—evoke both her interior emotional landscape and a place she regularly saw but never visited in Lahore, Pakistan, where she grew up. That flat place, a large field near her childhood home, occupies a huge place in her memory. It is, she explains, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, the base that her life stands upon, mostly because it was open and apparently unrestricted, two qualities that were absent from her life. Her father, a doctor, kept the family isolated from outsiders. He was perhaps paranoid, perhaps narcissistic—language Masud doesn’t use—and definitely angry, emotionally distant, threatening, and potentially violent. A raging man with firearms is frightening. Masud describes him as “a megalomaniac and a fantasist.” Her mother had experienced childhood trauma and may have been raped by her husband before their marriage; she could not protect her daughters from him. The rest of the household—it wasn’t a nuclear family; her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived in the tiny house—were just as emotionally disturbed. Her grandmother, for instance, was emotionally scarred by the years of turmoil caused by the Partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim states in 1948 and “married off at sixteen to a man who hardly spoke.” She once told Masud that hugging a baby will turn it into a weakling. Masud describes her Pakistani grandfather as “half mad.” Her other grandfather, who was Scots, took his own life. The trauma on both sides of her family goes back generations, and for her Pakistani relatives, it’s part of the legacy of colonialism. Masud is infuriated by the blithe acceptance by white Britons of the trauma colonized and racialized people are simply supposed to accept. Nobody in her family is evil, just damaged, and even her father has his good points, but the result of the chaos and coldness, for Masud, is cPTSD.

Unlike regular PTSD, which typically results from some clearly marked horror, cPTSD is the result of many, even daily, small traumatic events, like the ones Masud experienced with her father. The trauma, following psychiatrist Judith Herman, is prolonged and repeated. But, because those events seem so minor, people with cPTSD often don’t understand how they could have had such an effect. But Masud was shaped by those daily events, the chronic lovelessness, the ongoing fear and rejection. When she was sixteen, her father told his wife and children to leave. Her older sister had committed some offence at university in Europe—a photograph was sent, and although we don’t get the details, it may have been sexually compromising in some way—and for whatever reason, he blamed them. I wonder if the sister was with another woman in the photo; Masud herself is queer, or seems to be. She saw him once more, eight years later. When he died, she felt little.

But she usually feels little. She has friends but finds intimate connections difficult. Her flat emotional life, her suicidal thoughts, suggests depression, but she has other symptoms: physical pain; stomach problems; derealization, a dissociative disorder; chronic freezing and fawning responses to stressful situations—which, for Masud and her strained nervous system, can be just about anything.

How does all of this relate to flat places? They have “always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me,” she explains. “Flat places have always given me a way to love myself.” They “quieter the thing in me that’s always crying,” she continues. The contradiction she sees in them—between everything being visible and there being nothing to see—sends a message that’s impossible to decode. “Flat landscapes ask us to tolerate not knowing things,” Masud tells us. “Not knowing what is beneath the surface, whether anything is. A flat landscape’s combination of complete exposure and complete withholding asks us to accept that there are things we’ll never understand.” By presenting us with this uncertainty, flat places “help us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘matter’”—and, for her, “they provide solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling.” They give her permission “to be numb, to be without feeling or desire.”

That’s a hard way to live, and in part Masud’s walks through flat places help her become less numb. And, in part Masud’s, they just provide her with the reassurance she describes. Even if she doesn’t feel emotions strongly, her writing is beautiful, absolutely stunning. I opened the book at random and found this paragraph about the Newcastle Moor, which I find lovely:

The cows were sometimes on one side of South Nuns Moor, sometimes on the other. People say that cows lie down when rain is coming. But the moor cows lay down, and stood up, and I found out that neither meant anything, in terms of the weather. Once I found three of them arranged in a kind of triskelion shape, tail to tail and gazing implacably out across the moor. “Hello, gorgeous!” I catcalled as I passed, and they said nothing.

The phrase “in terms of the weather” leaves open the possibility that the cows’ actions might have some other meaning, perhaps one known only to them—the “not knowing” she finds reassuring. And who hasn’t spoken to an animal or bird as they passed? I do that all the time, and while that might be unusual, I doubt that it is. Plus the word “triskelion”! The whole book is full of such writing. Masud is an award-winning scholar of twentieth-century literature, and her prose suggests that she might win other kinds of prizes, too.

A Flat Place is an original book that brings place and psychology and walking together. If you’re interested in any of those things, check it out.

26. Louise Bernice Halfe—Sky Dancer, wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration

Louise Halfe is an important poet; the former Saskatchewan poet laureate and parliamentary poet laureate’s work reveals the truth of residential schools and colonialism more generally, and the difficult work of recovery and restoring balance to individuals and communities, in ways that would cause the scales to drop from the eyes of the most entrenched denialist. And wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, her new collection of short essays and poems, is also (not surprisingly) essential.

The subtitle, especially the word “inspiration,” is the key. Inspiration is related to respiration, and for Halfe, inspiration flows like breath, in and out, a cyclical rhythm that’s linked to other cycles (the round of the seasons, for instance) and the wind. The book’s first poem refers to the wind’s “plaintive breath,” and the last one concludes, “I will be one / with their breath.” Those lines are about “the Night Sky Dancers,” the “Great Mystery” that nourishes Halfe constantly.

So much has happened to interfere with those relationships, to block both breath and inspiration: residential schools, lateral violence, colonialism, cultural genocide. wîhtamawik traces possibilities of recovery from those ongoing harms, through language and ceremony and creative expression. It presents us with layered connections, between the cycles of our bodies and our lives, and the greater cycles of the world that sustain us. It shares ethical truths from Plains Cree or nêhiyaw culture, ideals we would all do well to try to follow. It emphasizes a holistic approach to life, one that brings together our minds, bodies, spirits, and the earth. There’s a lot to think about here, and that thinking can only open up new possibilities, perhaps ones that lead towards the decolonization Halfe urges.

I will be in conversation with Halfe and poet and scholar Jesse Archibald-Barber at Artesian in Regina on the evening of Tuesday, May 19, as part of the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. It promises to be a productive discussion; if you’re in or close to Regina, please join us.

Dani Karavan, “Passatjes,” Portbou, Spain

Dani Karavan’s memorial to the philosopher Walter Benjamin, Passatjes, has been here in Portbou since 1994. Benjamin died here in 1940. Although he had a safe conduct pass that should’ve allowed him to cross Spain and enter Portugal, the police refused him entry. Because he was in poor health, he was allowed to remain in Portbou overnight. In the Hotel Francia, he took his life. His despair is understandable. As a Marxist and a Jew, the Nazis would certainly have murdered him—his brother was killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942—and he had already spent time in a French prison after the Nazis had revoked his citizenship, leaving him stateless. His plan was to join other emigré philosophers in the United States. One can imagine how he felt about discovering that his safe conduct (imagine what that had cost) was worthless, that he was being sent back to France to die. He’s as much a victim of the Holocaust as anyone else who the Nazis murdered.

Passatjes (the title refers to the German title of Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, The Arcades Project) is situated on a hill above the bay, next to the cemetery where Benjamin’s remains rested for five years before the local man who was covering the rent on the crypt stopped paying, and Benjamin was removed and reinterred in a common grave.

Passatjes works on many levels, literally and metaphorically. I first approached it, accidentally, from below (I missed the signs that point tourists in the right direction), where it looks like a chute, part of a mine or a smelter, poised to dump rock or molten metal onto the road (and onto me). The rusty steel of which it’s constructed (Core-10, I think, although it’s not quite rusty enough for that) adds to the impression. I turned toward the bay and looked across at the buildings and the green and rocky hills on the opposite side. My perspective was open, unchanneled, I could look wherever I liked.

Then I walked back through the village, climbed the stairs, and followed the road to the memorial. There it was: a line of rusted steel plates across the parking lot; a darker patch of stone in the wall on the other side, facing the monument; and the steel tunnel and stairs that lead down the cliff, the bottom closed off by a sheet of plate glass. The description on the official website says there’s an olive tree, too, but I didn’t notice it, or at least I wasn’t sure which tree it is meant.

The form imitates the neighbouring cemetery, which is also built around stairs on the hillside, but where it is colourful and light and open, Passatjes is dark, somber, and enclosed. As visitors descend, their feet create deep, echoing hollow thuds; when the roof of the tunnel opens to the sky, turning the work into a steel trench, I heard the ghostly echoes of the voices of people above in the parking lot, which were somehow caught between the rusty walls. It’s chilly. The glass reflects the people on the stairs, dimly, while allowing us to see the relative and unreachable freedom of the bay below. The stairs continue past the glass; if it weren’t there, we could continue to descend until we fell to our deaths.

The text etched into the glass is ghostly, too, its words hard to make out against the light streaming through from outside, even on this cloudy day. The text etched into the glass at the bottom of the memorial’s stairs alludes to Benjamin’s second burial. It’s a quotation from Thesis 7 of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” an essay published not long after his death. (He was carrying a heavy manuscript in his suitcase, one he said was more valuable than his own life, but it went missing after his death and has never been found. The quotation is in four languages: Spanish, Catalan, French, and English. Notably, deliberately, not German, the language Benjamin spoke, the language of the country of his birth. In English, it reads,

It is more difficult to honour the memory of the anonymous than the renowned. Historical construction is devoted to the memory of the anonymous.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have minded being placed among those who couldn’t afford a more noteworthy burial: the poor, refugees. Perhaps that’s a silly romantic notion.

I sat down at the bottom and thought about all the anonymous dead over the millennia, and the way that in a few years or short decades all of us will join Benjamin among them. It was all deeply moving.

Portbou is a cute little tourist village. Maybe Passatjes encourages more visitors; it’s hard to say. I did find a short pilgrimage of sorts, from the train station to the site of the Hotel Francia and the police station, and then the memorial. If I ever return to Barcelona, I’ll come to see Passatjes again.