It seems that winter may be finally loosening her icy grip on Cambridge - although she will hold on to those snow piles for weeks yet. But during one of the darkest moments, I read the following passage in the second installment of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trek-trilogy, Between the Woods and the Water (1986, New York Review). For just a moment, I could see summer.
"Those long un-desert-like stretches [of the Plain] have left a memory of dew and new grass and Malek's [that's his horse] hoofs trotting through woods and flowers while the climbing sun showed so clearly through leaves and petals and grass-blades that they seemed alight. The woods flickered with red-starts and wheatears, newly arrived after amazing journeys, their giveaway rumps darting through the tree-trunks among birds with their nests already built, and in the open, crested larks flew up from the grass at our approach and sang as thought they were suspended about the sky on threads. There was not a single way in which life could be improved."
I have found myself thinking of this passage during the minor-ly arduous trek to and from work. While I'm just walking to Harvard Square, Fermor is making his way on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. There is a languid, sun-gilded quality to this whole book so far, as Our Hero moves between ancient landed gentry and their marvelously shabby country houses across Transylvania, all in the somnolent late-summer haze of pre-war eastern Europe. I find myself wondering what happened to all those people, and their summer-y lives and houses. If one followed Fermor's trek today, what, if anything, would one find?
