On being an exile in one's own community (thanks, Jan Morris).

Not Mussolini.

It has been only a few months since I wrote about Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, "a meditation on the crossroads city of Trieste" (in Italy) by the Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris, who was born in 1926 and remains with us.

We visited Trieste just after Thanksgiving, and I became enamored of this amazing place, although it must be said that my geographic promiscuity is legendary in this regard. Trieste is one of several hundred European cities, towns and goat crossings in which I'd live happily ever after if afforded the chance -- or rather, if I could afford it, having dedicated my life to pro bono pay scales in pursuit of various windmills.

La Mancha? I'd live there, too.

Back to Trieste. Morris's book is history, travelogue and social commentary all at once, canvassing Illyrians, Austrians, Italians, Slovenes and Jews; long-term expatriate resident James Joyce's fondness for whorehouses and ill-fated Emperor Maximilian's unfortunate career choice in Mexico; Karst limestone topography, native Bora winds, the Glagolitic (old Slavic) alphabet and young Sigmund Freud's failure to determine how eels copulate; mediocre opera, excellent coffee and various movable landmarks; and not to exclude robust viewpoints about racism and nationalism (unsurprisingly she's decidedly against them).

She offers this summary, incorporating a few words about exile.

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to believe that its natural capital is Trieste.”

A noted last year, while Morris has not visited New Albany, she knows exactly what it feels like to exist here amid the reign of the mediocre charlatans. Internal exile, New Gahania-style, means being confined to quarters because it's too dumb to go outside.

The first mention at NA Confidential of Nawbany's congenital anti-intellectualism came in October of 2005, courtesy of long-forgotten 19th-century Hoosier writer and pedagogue, Bayard R. Hall:

In 1843, Hall wrote of frontier Indiana that "(w)e always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily, smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness."

Remarkably, Hall foresaw the 2000s, prompting the query: Why am I still here, continuing to live in New Albany, when I might be residing in another part of the state, country or world?

(Reader’s note: The axiom known as Thrasher’s Razor fully applies to this rumination, because now more than ever, we’re all here because we’re not all there.)

As the missus reminds me on widely scattered occasions -- basically, every morning at breakfast -- I’ve never been much in sync with the sort of polite poseur’s society values craved by the underachieving likes of Bob Caesar. They're far too banal an ordeal for me.

What's more, I’ve never been able to swim a lick unless it’s against the metaphorical tide. Contrarianism fits me like a well-tailored suit, which of course I’d subsequently refuse to wear, because you can’t trust anyone who does. Suits are little more than costumes to facilitate hiding behind.

Wouldn’t I be happier elsewhere, in a place with a cultural climate more in keeping with my personal value system, as opposed to one that prompts severe allergic (read: aesthetic) reactions? Haven’t “they” always told me to leave town if I didn’t like “their” toxic farrago of ignorance?

To which I’ve always succinctly replied: “You first, my dear Gaston.”

All this being said, for the first time since the 1980s, the notion of living elsewhere is being tossed around my dusty cranium. The forthcoming "60" seems a nice, round age to begin contemplating future options. If I'm lucky, two quality decades remain, with maybe some pocket change before eternity.

Is an open air museum where the life of the mind is shunned like a displaced coronavirus sufferer really the final stop for me -- for us? I don't know. All I know is it's worth thinking about.   

Baylor Family Croatia, Slovenia and Trieste 2019, Chapter 16: Over the Karst and into Trieste for a taste of the Bora.

Fresh fried sardines, Trieste.

We'd been in Lake Bled for three days.

As divulged previously, our recent vacation underwent emergency modification when Slovenia's Adria Airways went bankrupt at the beginning of October. We were compelled to rebook and fly via Zagreb rather than Ljubljana and Trieste, adding an extra evening (and train ride) on the front side and having little practical choice for the return except booking a transfer from Trieste to Zagreb by hired car and driver (more on this in Chapter 20).

During the course of 40 trips to Europe since 1985 totaling perhaps 2.5 years of accumulated time on the ground, I'd guess that maybe 24 to 36 hours of it in all (exempting short urban taxi rides) has been spent being driven around in an automobile. In fact I've never been behind the wheel in Europe, not even once. Consequently the most recent journey was very unusual, as we opted for a car twice in lieu of public transportation.

The second time was the Trieste-Zagreb connection. The first was from Bled to Trieste on Monday, December 2, via the Bled travel agency called Maya Bled Transfers, specializing in organizing day trips within a two-hour radius of Bled. This area of service includes an abundance of worthwhile sights and attractions. In our case, we just wanted to get to Trieste in the most efficient way we could, and while public transportation exists and is both usable and useful, it isn't always direct or timely.

The owner Maya herself picked us up at 11:00 a.m. at our hotel in Bled, and we embarked on a rainy two-hour drive to Trieste by way of Ljubljana.

It was autobahn all the way.

What had me weirdly motivated was the chance to cross the Karst plateau.

I'd traversed this terrain in the opposite direction back in 1987, but it was at night.

The Karst Plateau or the Karst region (Slovene: Kras, Italian: Carso), also locally called Karst, is a karst plateau region extending across the border of southwestern Slovenia and northeastern Italy.

It lies between the Vipava Valley, the low hills surrounding the valley, the westernmost part of the Brkini Hills, northern Istria, and the Gulf of Trieste. The western edge of the plateau also marks the traditional ethnic border between Italians and Slovenes. The region gave its name to karst topography. For this reason, it is also referred to as the Classical Karst.

Someday I hope to have the time to revisit Trieste in warmer weather and travel from the port city to Ljubljana, across the Karst, taking perhaps a week of short bus and train trips instead of an hour on the autobahn.

In her book Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, writer Jan Morris devotes a great deal of space to the centrality of the Karst to a sense of place in Trieste and surrounding areas.

She also writes evocatively about the limestone plateau above the city, the Karst – its name adopted by geologists to describe all such similar limestone topographies – an ‘elemental slab’ of rock and stone above the city, whose people have been hardened by history, climate and geology. It’s a Slavic world of partisans, the Glagolitic alphabet and Hum, the self-proclaimed ‘smallest town in the world’.

Traveling westbound from Ljubljana across the Karst, the modern the highway splits, with a southern fork departing to Koper, while the roughly westbound road to Trieste narrows as it approaches plateau's end; suddenly just after the barely attended border crossing switchbacks merge seamlessly with suburban Trieste, gently descending to sea level. This has a strange effect on my psyche. Morris comments:

Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (Although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high.) In my own experience it is more like our Welsh hiraeth, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what.

Maya handled the urban traffic with aplomb, having previously resided in Trieste. We said goodbye at the Hotel Roma. Check-in was easy, and by 2:00 p.m. we had set out for an orientation walk and maybe some lunch.

Ten minutes into it, the wind kicked up. Lo and behold, we'd arrived in Trieste just in time for our very first Bora.

The Bora is a wind that blows in a North North-Easterly direction from the mountains into the Gulf of Trieste. It blows intermittently with gusts that can occasionally be very strong. In Trieste the Bora is said to be "dark" when there is cloud, rain or snow, and "light" when the sky is clear.

Trieste and the Bora are inseparable. Trieste is the city of the Bora and the Bora is the wind of Trieste. When it arrives, the city wakes with an intense shudder. Trieste residents love it and endure it, but cannot be without it; when it isn't blowing, they hope for its return. It is an essential element of this city, perhaps because it sparks real and intense emotions that few can ignore.

First the Karst, then the Bora. I was smitten.

It was still overcast, spitting rain, with the the Gulf of Trieste all choppy and dark. We had sandwiches and beers at a cafe staffed entirely by young Chinese women -- I'm not jumping to conclusions, and it merely seemed unusual -- then returned to the hotel to nap before undertaking the most difficult task that visitors to places like Italy ever seek to achieve.

Is there a restaurant open to serve dinner before 8:00 p.m.?

Fortunately we found two good spots just three blocks from the hotel. For pre-dinner drinks, Hop & Rock; it's a well-organized and friendly craft beer bar.

A couple doors down is Santé wine and food (see the sardines pictured above). It's tiny, family-operated and chaotic, with the nightly menu on a chalkboard and a front-of-the-house interpreter who may just be having one too many shift drinks.

On Monday evening the rain passed through, but the Bora stuck around for 24 hours.

On a sunny Tuesday, we were off to explore Trieste. 

ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

"Melancholy is Trieste’s chief rapture. In almost everything I read about this city, by writers down the centuries, melancholy is evoked. It is not a stabbing sort of disconsolation, the sort that makes you pine for death (Although Trieste’s suicide rate, as a matter of fact, is notoriously high.) In my own experience it is more like our Welsh hiraeth, expressing itself in bitter-sweetness and a yearning for we know not what."
-- Jan Morris

Somewhere around 17 or 18 years ago I read Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, "a meditation on the crossroads city of Trieste" by the Welsh journalist and writer Jan Morris (born in 1926 and still very much with us).

Trieste is an Italian city bordering Croatia and Slovenia, on a finger of land on the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Once, it rivaled Hong Kong as a great commercial port, a crucial outpost of the Hapsburg Empire where Italians, Slavs, and Austrians met to do business. Trieste’s cosmopolitan character kept it from being dominated by any one religion. The city is pleasant visually, but was too commercial ever to become a center for art or architecture. Morris argues, in essence, that Trieste is a good place but not a great one: the food is excellent but not ethnically distinct, and the people themselves are gravely courteous, but undistinguished. Trieste is almost nationless, thus its appeal to exiles like Morris, who has traveled the world in search of an identity.

The key words for me are cosmopolitan, nationless, exiles and identity.

Actually I'd been in Trieste once, very briefly, passing through the city from points west in route to Slovenia, then a constituent element of communist Yugoslavia. I allowed nowhere near enough time in Trieste to indulge my quirky Hapsburg fetish, evidently so eager to cross the border to Ljubljana that I didn't take a single photograph.

Perhaps I purchased Morris' book fifteen years later as a form of exculpatory penance, or some type of rearview mirror perspective. I can't really comment because quite little from the book lodged in my memory, perhaps because I drank quite a lot back then.

Consequently I've just finished rereading it, which is something I seldom do. Self-interest is my primary rationale, seeing as we'll be visiting Trieste in November, but at the same time a determined Europhile's work is never done. Happily, significant portions of the narrative came back to me during the second reading.

Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere pleases and instructs both as meditation and memoir. Morris first came to Trieste in the Queen's service at the end of WWII and became enamored of the area. She wrote the book while in her eighth decade, taking stock of the city's changing fortunes; what Trieste had meant to her, and how both writer and city had aged, changed and in some cases stayed the same.

The book is history, travelogue and social commentary all at once, canvassing Illyrians, Austrians, Italians, Slovenes and Jews; long-term expatriate resident James Joyce's fondness for whorehouses and ill-fated Emperor Maximilian's unfortunate career choice in Mexico; Karst limestone topography, native Bora winds, the Glagolitic (old Slavic) alphabet and young Sigmund Freud's failure to determine how eels copulate; mediocre opera, excellent coffee and various movable landmarks; and not to exclude robust viewpoints about racism and nationalism (unsurprisingly she's decidedly against them).

Morris herself offers a summary.

“There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own. They are the lordly ones. They come in all colours. They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists. They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor. They may be patriots, but are never chauvinists. They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding. When you are among them you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically. They laugh easily. They are easily grateful. They are never mean. They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness. They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it. It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to believe that its natural capital is Trieste.”

That's incredible. Morris has not ever visited New Albany, and yet she knows exactly what it feels like to exist here amid the reign of the mediocre charlatans.

---

The city of Trieste and its many faces through the years obviously move the aging author deeply, as informed by her personal experiences, and this is why a 25-year-old simply cannot write a book like this. Youth is capable of combustion, stamina and other great feats, but it cannot conjure elegiac prose like this, finely book-ended with melancholy on one side and and as-yet undiminished joy for living on the other.

Threading this expository needle can be done only with age and accumulated wisdom, and in like fashion I read Morris' book the first time when I was in my early forties, still far too green to grasp it. Now at (almost) 59 years of age the tone cuts deeper. As an example, Morris as veteran travel writer confides that she has undertaken to look at Trieste in the same way she'd look into a mirror, which is what travel is all about in the first place.

Morris quotes Wallace Stevens.

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself

So it has been, with her and with me. She then returns to the concept of exile, applying it to our journey into old age.

For years I felt myself an exile from normality, and now I feel myself one of those exiles from time. The past is a foreign country, but so is old age, and as you enter it you feel you are treading unknown territory, leaving your own land behind. You’ve never been here before. The clothes people wear, the idioms they use, their pronunciation, their assumptions, tastes, humours, loyalties all become the more alien the older you get. The countryside changes. The policeman are children. Even hypochondria, the Trieste disease, is not what it was, for that interesting pain in the ear-lobe may not now be imaginary at all, but some obscure senile reality.

Chronologically a mere fifteen years separate me from Morris's age at the time she wrote Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, and yet at no point in my life have I felt emotions like these as keenly, whether pertaining to mirrors, exile, melancholy, uncertainty or plain bewilderment about why I'm here and what it's all supposed to mean.

It's actually not a debilitating frame of mine, just introspective. My head is clear, and there has been no temptation to climb back into multiple bottles. Yet the Welsh concept of hiraeth, this bittersweet yearning for an indefinable something referenced by Morris, nips constantly these days at my conscious existence.

Round and round we go, and where it stops -- well, we already know.

---

Only as a postscript, here's a bit more about Jan Morris. Perhaps she knows better than most of us what the search for self-identity really means.

Jan Morris, CBE, FRSL (born 2 October 1926) is a Welsh historian, author and travel writer. She is known particularly for the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968–1978), a history of the British Empire, and for portraits of cities, notably Oxford, Venice, Trieste, Hong Kong, and New York City. A trans woman, she was published under her birth name, James, until 1972, when she had sex reassignment after transitioning from living as male to living as female.

Morris has joked that in spite of a successful career in journalism and dozens of books, her obituaries will be headlined “Sex-change author dies.” Wikipedia continues:

In 1949, Morris married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter; they had five children together, including the poet and musician Twm Morys. One of their children died in infancy. Morris began a sex change in 1964. In 1972, Morris travelled to Morocco to undergo sex reassignment surgery, performed by surgeon Georges Burou, because doctors in Britain refused to allow the procedure unless Morris and Tuckniss divorced, something Morris was not prepared to do at the time. They divorced later, but remained together and on 14 May 2008 were legally reunited when they formally entered into a civil partnership. Morris detailed her transition in Conundrum (1974), her first book under her new name, and one of the first autobiographies to discuss a personal gender reassignment.

Tuckniss,now suffering from dementia, has said that she always knew about Jan, even when Jan was James; it was merely something to be gotten through together. The raw power of a 70-year-long love story like this has even am inveterate Grinch like me reaching for the hankies when he reads the last line.

At the same time that Jan was transitioning from male to female, she was also moving from being thoroughly English (Oxford, the army, the Times) to thoroughly Welsh. Jan and Elizabeth bought a big house in the far north-west of Wales, where they still live, and Jan began to embrace a Welsh republicanism that has become one of the great passions of her life. When Jan and Elizabeth die, they will be buried together on an island in a stream near their home, beneath a stone bearing an inscription in both English and Welsh that says: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

“Here lie two friends, at the end of one life.”

We should all be as fortunate.

---

Recent columns:

July 4: ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

Jan Morris and Trieste, but mostly Jan Morris.

The home library has not been harnessed to Melvil Dewey's decimal system. Books are shelved in approximate locations, but we've run out of shelving again, and as the unhandiest of men it might be a while before I create more.

But I found what I was looking for: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, by Jan Morris.

I was quite sure Morris was dead, but not so. She's fascinating in her own right, as this April, 2019 piece illustrates.

The Many Lives of Jan Morris, by Sarah Lyall (New York Times)

It wasn’t until her latest book, “In My Mind’s Eye,” was serialized on BBC that many of her neighbors realized there was a celebrity in their midst.

CRICCIETH, Wales — Everyone here seems to know Jan Morris, even the waitress at the local fish restaurant. “Have you met Jan before?” she asks as Morris materializes from what, due to a trick of the light, looks to be the ocean itself, clouds of white hair wafting and fluffing around her face.

Morris is 92 and walks carefully, with the help of a cane. She has lived in this corner of North Wales — a 3-plus hour train ride from London, and then another 45 minutes by car — for most of her life. In Britain, she is a renowned and beloved essayist, historian, journalist and chronicler of places, the author of more than four dozen books, but it wasn’t until her latest work, “In My Mind’s Eye,” was serialized on BBC radio last fall that many of her neighbors realized there was a celebrity in their midst.

Morris has lived many lives, and it is impossible to separate who she is now from who she was before: James Humphrey Morris, who was born in 1926 in Somerset, England, and whose education and career were typical of privileged Englishmen at the time.

Morris was a choral scholar at Christ Church, Oxford; served in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers during the waning years of World War II; and at age 23, met and married Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter. They raised four children together (a fifth died in infancy).

There have been plot twists.

The biggest constant in her life has been Elizabeth, who was first her wife and then her ex-wife — same-sex marriage was illegal in Britain in 1972 — and is now her legal civil partner, her closest companion for more than 70 years. The couple settled here in Wales; Elizabeth mostly stayed home and Morris lived a peripatetic existence, traveling and writing and then traveling again.

What an incredible love story!

Morris’s deep love of Elizabeth, her lifelong companion, has run like a golden thread through the conversation. When they first met, they so delighted in each other’s company that when Elizabeth took the bus to work, Morris would ride with her so the two could keep talking.

But now Elizabeth is suffering from dementia, what Morris calls “that subtle demon of our time,” and it is a difficult time for a couple who have always shared everything. Morris prefers not to dwell on it, but it is clear that weighs heavily.