Inevitable

I'm writing from Boston, where the weather is gray and wet. I'm staying in a hotel near Beacon Hill, and I took a walk earlier this evening down Charles Street, looking in the shop windows from the gaslit sidewalk.

On the flight to Boston, I finished reading "A Time of Gifts" by Patrick Leigh Fermor. It's the story of a young man who decided to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934. It's a fascinating book, especially in his portrait of the last remnants of the Hapsburg Empire before they were completely obliterated by World War II.

I've been planning a trip to Europe this fall with a group of friends. I was arguing that we visit many of the places Fermor trekked through in the book. But eventually, warm and sunny Italy won out over Vienna, Prague and Budapest. So I chuckled when I read the following passage in "A Time of Gifts," as Fermor plots out his trip from Vienna:

Back among the maps, and conscious all at once of the accessibility of the Mediterranean, I was assaulted by a train of thought which for a moment set the expedition in jeopardy. It is a famous hazard. All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of a nearly irresistible pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandoline strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe's Law and is ineluctable as Newton's or Boyle's.