One of the great questions of the humanities – and across the liberal arts – is the connection between a writer, researcher, scientist, or artist and his or her work: between biography and thought. I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure there is one.  One can certainly appreciate the work of Michelangelo, Mozart, Wittgenstein, of Virginia Woolf, without knowing much about their personal lives. But both the work and the life are products of the same human psyche. 

Within moments of landing in Czechoslovakia (as it was then still called) in the late spring of 1990, I could sense a country in hurried and dramatic transition yet keeping intact a quirky and ironic soul. The currency clerk at the Prague airport seemed befuddled about the correct exchange rate between US dollars and Czech crowns, and he gave me a tiered rate roughly averaging the market rate. An hour later, as I was checking in to my hotel, the same fellow appeared in the lobby, looking even more flustered. He had tracked me down because he needed a few hundred crowns back or would have to pay the difference out of his own pocket. A week later, as I was leaving the country, the same teller exchanged my crowns back into dollars, with a shy smile of recognition. 

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Maybe so; but it can also calm the mind in unpredictable ways that staying home does not. This happened to me once before, when I returned to New York on the eve of 9/11, deeply imprinted by the tranquility I had experienced at a certain untamed garden in the South of France. As fear spread across America that September and in the months that followed, I kept returning in my mind to that garden, and regaining a center. And it happened again on the cusp of Covid-19.