Culture

So Bittlestone spent an afternoon and evening in Diggle’s college rooms laying out his theory. By midnight Diggle asked to sleep on it. “By the next morning, I was able to email him and say, ‘I slept on this and this is absolutely brilliant and we must pursue it.’”

Bittlestone had noticed that Homer’s highly detailed geographic descriptions in the Odyssey could not be reconciled with modern-day Ithaki. For instance, Homer states that Ithaca was the furthest west of three islands and the furthest out to sea. Modern Ithaki is the closest to the Greek mainland and the furthest east.

Homer describes Odysseus’s home as low-lying. Modern Ithaki is mountainous.

Bittlestone argued that the Paliki peninsula on the next-door island of Kefalonia perfectly matched Homer’s descriptions. It faces the sea, is the furthest west, and is low-lying. There was only one problem: Paliki is a peninsula, and everyone “knew” Ithaca was an island.

To solve this, Bittlestone theorised that during the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BC — the era of the Trojan War — Paliki was separated from the rest of Kefalonia by a marine channel. Because Kefalonia sits directly over two tectonic plates, Bittlestone suggested that massive earthquake-induced rockfalls had eventually filled the channel in, turning the island into a peninsula.

Next Bittlestone approached Professor John Underhill, a geoscientist. Underhill said: “Robert called me and started the conversation by saying: ‘I’m not a crank,’ and when you hear that you think: ‘Oh my word …’ He’d found my PhD based on the geology of western Greece via Google and introduced me to the project.”

Austrian Airlines is big on hot rolls. Red-clad flight attendants continually tout their hot rolls in the accents of many nations, including, one feels, nations that haven’t actually been founded yet. (“Hod roolz?” “Hat rahls?” “Hoot rowls?”) The in-flight safety video is troubling: It’s animated and features a Sims-like guy with what looks like a skinless, skeletal death’s-head who keeps turning to leer at a slim Sims lady who keeps looking away, alarmed, while trying to get her long legs tucked away somewhere so Death can’t see them. Later she slides down the emergency slide, holding a Sims baby, Death still pursuing her.

Ancient Mariner-style, my seatmate, a Kosovar, tells me about a Serbian paramilitary group called the Black Hand that left a childhood friend of his on a hillside, “cut into tiny pieces.” During the occupation, he says, the Serbs often killed babies in front of their parents. He is kindly, polite, awed by the horrible things he’s seen, grateful that, as an American citizen, he no longer has to worry about murdered babies or hacked-up friends, except, it would appear, in memory, constantly.

Story told, he goes off to sleep.

But I can’t. I’m too uncomfortable. I’m mad at myself for eating two roolz during the last Round of Roolz, roolz that seem to have instantaneously made my pants tighter. I’ve already read all my books and magazines, already stood looking out the little window in the flight-attendant area, already complimented a severe blond flight attendant on Austrian Airlines’ excellent service, which elicited an oddly Austrian reaction: She immediately seemed to find me reprehensible and weak.

On the bright side, only six more hours on this plane, then two hours in the Vienna airport and an eight-hour flight to Katmandu.

I decide to close my eyes and sit motionless, to make the time pass.

Somebody slides up their window shade and, feeling the change in light on my eyelids, I am filled with sudden curiosity: Has the shade really been lifted? By someone? Gosh, who was it? What did they look like? What were they trying to accomplish by lifting the shade? I badly want to open my eyes and confirm that a shade has indeed been lifted, by someone, for some purpose. Then I notice a sore patch on the tip of my tongue and feel a strong desire to interrupt my experiment to record the interesting sore-tongue observation in my notebook. Then I begin having Restless Leg Syndrome, Restless Arm Syndrome, and even a little Restless Neck Syndrome. Gosh, am I thirsty. Boy, is my breath going to be bad when this stupid experiment is over. I imagine a waterfall of minty water flowing into my mouth, a waterfall that does not have to be requested via the stern flight attendant but just comes on automatically when I press a button on the overhead console marked MINTY WATER.

The mind is a machine that is constantly asking: What would I prefer? Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is. A desire arises, you satisfy that desire, and another arises in its place. This wanting and rewanting is an endless cycle for which, turns out, there is already a name: samsara. Samsara is at the heart of the vast human carnival: greed, neurosis, mad ambition, adultery, crimes of passion, the hacking to death of a terrified man on a hillside in the name of A More Pure and Thus Perfect Nation—and all of this takes place because we believe we will be made happy once our desires have been satisfied.

I know this. But still I’m full of desire. I want my legs to stop hurting. I want something to drink. I even kind of want another hot roll.

Seven months, I think? The kid has been sitting there seven months?

Is there a right way to witness history? Asked to name famous examples from the last century, I should think first of George Orwell shouldering a rifle alongside ill-equipped Spanish partisans, James Agee reverently cataloging the meager contents of sharecroppers’ homes, and Robert Capa clambering ashore at Normandy with his camera alongside soldiers of the Fighting First, from which ordeal only 11 blurred snapshots survived, showing those about to die already ghostlike in his lens. Percipience is a must; and above other traits, we have tended to want our witnesses to history—especially the bad side of history—to be humane. What are we to make, then, of a war correspondent, a writer of real courage, who saw more clearly and comprehensively than almost anyone else, yet who was only intermittently interested in the lives (especially the inner lives) of others? A man who cultivated a brutal dictator as his father figure; who was attracted to blood, and perhaps more fascinated than appalled by many of the horrors he bore witness to; and whose putative masterpiece contains, in its author’s own words, “nothing but soldiers, corpses, dogs, sunflowers, horses, and clouds”? A chameleon who veered from fervent Fascism in 1920s Italy to avowed anti-Fascism after the war, remaining an incorrigible fabulist all the while: Could such a figure possibly be a valuable, not to say a reliable, witness? What are we to make of the mercurial, controversial, egotistical Curzio Malaparte?