The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

memory of another time and circumstance and place. As Charles Wright wrote in his poem “Southern Cross” (I took a writing course from Wright at the University of California in 1981, and have the slim volume of that same name in my hand now), “How sweet is the past, no matter how wrong, or how sad/How sweet is yesterday’s noise.” Spread out on the floor as some already are, others still shut tight inside boxes, these books have regained a kind of potential; they are vulnerable, in their happy dis- order, to rediscovery, if only of a fleeting kind. Like the uneven layered circles in the trunk of a tree, they etch the outlines of my life in a casual design, and sketch a kind of autobiography — the contents of which are scat- tered inside their pages, or hidden in the plain sight of their covers. Each time I go through this ritual I won- der which thoughts since lost, which possible futures in the past, will sneak up on me suddenly and take me back over again. Youth, as Milan Kundera wrote, is a lyrical age. But what age comes after? And do you lose the capac- ity for longing? Or is it only buried under the differ- ent layers of coming to terms with “reality” that mark one’s slow (in my case) evolution to adulthood? I read mostly poetry and fiction during those years, and one of my ambitions was to attain a consciousness of the planet hurtling through the cosmos. As I sift through a disorderly stack for my dog-eared copy of the Collected Walt Whitman , I stumble instead across Charles Simic’s Selected Poems: 1963-1983 , and turn to “Help Wanted” — a piece that comically depicts the Gumby-like mental flexibility of the desperate job-seeker (I was a lousy one more than once): “They ask for a knife/I come running/They need a lamb/ I introduce myself as the lamb.” Incidentally, every time I hear the word “reality” Nabokov’s description of it as “one of the few words that mean nothing without quotes” comes to mind. I first read Nabokov’s startlingly rich and vibrant work ( Lolita , Pale Fire …) while living in Japan in the late 1980s, a time (ironically) that marked the end of my own lyrical age and, by way of a wobbly transition, the beginning of a brief dry era of social science. I have mostly happy memories of the transition, though, which is (in some sense) embodied in one of the best books I’ve read about Japan: Kurt Singer’s Mirror, Sword, and Jewel. I recall in particular Singer’s per- ception of Japan as a civilization that has overcome the tragedy of modern life and achieved “integration.” By contrast, here in Latin America where I live now, that tragedy — or “the wide disparity between the beauty and greatness of … works of art, systems of law, meta- physical constructions … and the … shapelessness and jejuneness of ordinary human existence” — is at times painfully conspicuous. Singer’s perception may not be as pertinent to the Japan of today, but it’s something to think about all the same. As for my life in the Foreign Service, it, too, has found a place on my bookshelves, resembling (to con- tinue the earlier metaphor) the fresh circles on the outer edges of the tree trunk: A selection of works about Guatemala and by Guatemalan writers, some interest- ing additions to my already substantial collection of books on Japan, a handful of books on Indonesia, and a modest grouping about (mostly the politics and history of) Malaysia. These are complemented by the dozen or so volumes that reflect my foray into Islam and the Middle East (works by V.S. Naipal, Edward Said, Thomas Friedman … ) spurred by the Southeast Asia experience. A small shelf-full of deepening nostalgia … F O C U S J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 37 Alexis Ludwig was a free-lance writer in San Francisco before he joined the Foreign Service in January 1994. He is currently serving in La Paz. A small shelf-full of deepening nostalgia.