So on first glance there might seem to be a slight irony to the fact that they’re hosting, together with Austria (an EU member) this year’s Euro 2008, the European football (or soccer if you prefer) championship held every four years. But then of course all these categorizations and groupings are as arbitrary and fundamentally meaningless as many words in the dictionary. Turkey is participating in the championship and may well win it, although we know that many EU members are opposed to Turkey joining the EU, and many people would argue that Turkey is not Europe. But that is matter for another debate; you could also argue that Russia is as European, or not, as Turkey…

I have been watching many of the games over the last two weeks. It feels like a civic duty: streets, supermarkets, shops, cars, houses are all festooned with flags not only from Switzerland, but also Italy, Spain, Turkey, Portugal, representing large and influential immigrant communities. Whenever a team scores a goal, you can hear horns blowing, sometimes in the house next door (at least they don’t shoot, like in Croatia). After the decisive victory, supporters of the winning teams drive around town honking. Apparently they are allowed by law to half an hour, but after Spain’s victory last night I was hearing honking well into the night. It’s only once every four years (two if you count the World Cup), so the police tend to be indulgent. They may even be out honking themselves, if they’re second generation immigrants…

Four years ago I was in Greece when the Greek team won the championship. It was wild, unheard of, one of Europe’s dark horses, little Greece beating host country Portugal in the final. I was on the staid, religious island of Tinos and even the priests were shouting and screaming. Fireworks outside the churches; honking all night long. Friends in Athens said they did not sleep.

What is it about this football fever that makes everyone go wild? Why do I, a perfectly sedate and graying woman, sit all alone in front of the television screaming “Allez Ribé!” or “Ajde Hrvatska!” or “Elate paidia!” Is it memories of the 1998 World Cup final when Croatia lost to France, but not before scoring a goal that showed me briefly, in the café on Hvar where I sat watching the game surrounded by Croatian nationalists, how a collective fever can blind you, intoxicate you, make you do ridiculous and dangerous things you would never do otherwise? Football is a tremendous safety valve; but it is also a fervent way of feeling human, of sharing with strangers, of knowing what it is to be together on this tiny planet and having to get along. Friends who were in Paris in 1998 or Rome in 2006 say how unforgettable the experience was—as was my time on Tinos. I am deeply sorry the Swiss team have not made it to the final: their generosity, their hospitality, surely makes them as deserving as Greece, or any host country in the end. But especially one that is more truly European than most.

But then, the Swiss have Roger Federer. And Wimbledon has just started…

Flag photo courtesy Getty images

For now I am in a strange limboland of not there and not here. I left there, California, a week ago to start a new life in Switzerland, but I’m not here yet. I’m in a sad and horrible place of looking after my sick cat, who clearly did not want to leave California.

He had a good life there. He could go outside and hunt, and often proudly brought me birds and mice and even rats. (Thank you, Filou, very kind of you, now look the other way while I toss the corpse down into the ravine). He was popular with the neighbors, and even had a secret life every afternoon with the little boy and girl across the street. His only brush with unpleasantness was a close encounter with a coyote, until he was rescued by a kindly neighbor.

Then it all changed. I was forced to move, and he couldn’t stay behind. Friends offered a temporary shelter to both of us in their house. He had a huge room to himself and all his toys and catnip and a view on the birdfeeder, but it wasn’t the same. It was cold, I was away a lot, he meowed and no one listened. He was ferried back and forth to the vet no less than five times for various shots and microchips and deworming medications that no customs authority even asked for. By the time he was bundled into his cat carrier to fly to Europe he was already sick. You wouldn’t have thought it to hear him vocalizing along the corridors of Charles de Gaulle airport, but he would not drink or eat.

I have taken him three times to the vet this week. Each time he has his subcutaneous drip he gets some energy and seems on the mend, only to curl up ever tighter into a ball by the next morning. The latest visit, complete with x-ray, has not augured well. One more trip to a specialist, next week, will determine whether he will enjoy his retirement in Switzerland, which has no coyotes.

The point, beyond my anguish and grief, is that my life is on hold, suspended between a period of frenetic activity and a new beginning. I eke out my hours watching television adaptations of Our Mutual Friend, or endless replays of the news on the BBC. I sleep at odd times and check email at odder times. This is a kind of antechamber, where I am waiting for one life to end and another to begin. Purgatory, even. It is pointless to argue that if I had stayed in California Filou would not have gotten sick, it just might not have been precipitated by all the vaccinations and rides to the vet’s. And at this very moment it is pointless to assume he will not be with me to begin this new life, but unrealistic not to face that possibility. But it is, to say the least, a strange coming together of circumstances, and animals often reflect or absorb our anxieties and turbulence, in addition to their own sense of loss. Modern technology may provide a few explanations next week, but not any real answers.

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is only two o’clock in the morning, central European time, as I write this, but who’s looking at clock faces in this country of clocks. Someday I will look back and see the strange hole in my life, made by time and space a little animal’s retreat into illness—or perhaps overwhelming sadness at having lost his home.

It was one of those phone calls when you know there’s something not right. This person shouldn’t be calling you at this time of day, or on your cell phone. You answer, and to make things worse, it’s your landlady, and after a moment of annoyance that she is calling you at work, you hear her saying right up front that she has bad news.

Pick one, goes your catastrophe-panicked brain:

a) The house has burnt down.

b) She has to raise the rent, or sell, and who knows who your landlord will be then.

c) She found your kitty run over in the street.

To be honest, for me the worst was c). So when she told me that she wanted to move into my place, to save money because she couldn’t make her mortgage payments, given the current state of the US economy and variable rate mortgages, and if she moved to my little cottage she could rent her (much bigger and nicer) place and make up the difference, I was almost relieved. My cat was all right, walking indifferently over the sudden rubble of my life.

I moved into this charming little cottage just slightly over two years ago from a place where I had lived for 12 years. The longest I had ever lived in one place in my entire life. I was forced out by someone rich enough to buy a wreck of a building with an address it almost didn’t deserve, had it not been home for 30 years to one of California’s best writers, my neighbor Leonard Gardner. If we had been in another country–France, say–there might have been demonstrations or petitions to try to save the ramshackle place for Leonard’s sake. But this was America, and Marin County on top of it, where the proprietor rules, is all- powerful, and I could fill this website with all the cliches surrounding the fat man with the cigar in his mouth.

But my landlady is not a fat man with a cigar, she is a single woman struggling to keep her business going when she should be retired somewhere warm and comfortable. Her business is suffering because the entire country is “suffering”–I’m not sure I like the emotional euphemism for a decrease in purchasing power. We all suffer not for financial reasons, which vary from one person to the next, and are always extremely relative compared to, say, our neighbors south of the border; no, if we are suffering it is because these financial constraints (ah, much better word) have been placed on us by society, and we are not free.

I have been a renter all my life, hating the lack of freedom contingent with the possibility that any afternoon a landlord can give me bad news, and I become emotionally homeless once again. I have sat in rooms at parties with people who have always owned, and felt the divide between us as if it were a class barrier, (which it is, in this country) as well as a chasm in experience. No one in this country rents if they can own; rent is for transient, struggling or bohemian individuals, or the very young, or the very old–a bit like public transportation.

I rapidly took the decision to leave California and the United States, after twenty-one years. For most of those twenty-one years I have been a guest here, in my assorted sublets and apartments and cottages. For most of those twenty-one years I have wished I were elsewhere, principally back in Europe. I have kept the French language as my second home, one I own, one that I can never have taken away from me, although the barrier at parties remains, that of not sharing a language and its attendant experience and view of the world.

In five days I will take my cat and board a plane for Charles de Gaulle, where I’ll change for Geneva, to start a new life in a neighboring town. It will be a homecoming of sorts, the exile’s return, although I will enter another sort of exile, from the English language this time. But only to a degree: English is everywhere, and will become my second home, while French will offer me shelter. I’ll be living in a place where the vast majority of people are renters; some of my friends have been living in the same apartments for thirty years. There is protection for renters, they are far less vulnerable than in the United States; landlords are corporations, insurance companies, businesses. There are no proprietary divides at dinner parties, only experiences that transcend the pull of capitalism. Not that I won’t miss California: the nature, the space, the sense of immense possibility and energy.

But one grows tired of moving, of being dependent on the whims of those who have money, or not enough of it but still own property. Ultimately, my landlady has done me a favor: she is helping me to survive my own life, as it were. She will stay behind to deal with the struggling economy and her mortgage. She has already begun to tear the cottage apart, remodelling to suit her whims. It’s what you do with your money.

I think, as the plane lifts off and I look out onto the bay covered in fog on Thursday, that I will feel a new freedom, even if at the moment I don’t have a roof over my head to call my own.

Tired, I ridiculously looked for Tom Jones under Jones. This book has been such a part of my life I sometimes forget it was written by a Mr. Fielding, and would therefore be found under Fielding. Did I find it? There was Bridget Jones’s Diary (coincidence? relation?) also misfiled under Fielding. But nary a sign of Tom. I asked at the information desk (Stacey’s still has an information desk of very knowledgable, older, salespeople, who have heard of Tom Jones and have also heard of the wrong Tom Jones (the Welsh one with a sartorial problem). She shook her (gray) head and said that they had no copies in stock, and it would take two days, and after all this was disgraceful, they ought to have it she muttered, apologetically.

They did have Amélie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling which I also had to buy for reasons I won’t go into but heartily recommend for anyone contemplating working for a Japanese company (or any other huge corporation for that matter). So I took Amélie, considerably lighter than Tom would have been, and headed for the cash register.

I waited a long time; a man was going into something at length with the cashier but I was too far away to hear what he was saying, or understand what was taking so long. When my turn finally came I went up to the cashier, an elderly gentleman with big round glasses and a white beard and a sad Santa air about him. He apologized for the delay, then began shaking his head violently. “That man,” he said, “said he’s moving away from San Francisco because it has become a bedroom community for software developers.” I laughed; you could see it that way. But then the cashier went on, “What do you suppose he meant by that? Why is San Francisco a bedroom community?”

I was a little surprised, but also somewhat charmed that the concept had escaped him. “Well,” I ventured, “I suppose he means that people live in San Francisco and commute down to Silicon Valley for their jobs…”

“Why not just live down there?”

Logical, but…”Perhaps they like to be in the city, for the restaurants and shops and so on. I suppose it’s more interesting here than Redwood City or Mountain View.”

I pictured the old guy living in a quiet Victorian somewhere, with his meager pension, rounding out his month with his wage from Stacey’s; maybe he was one of the last of the true booklovers, who lived in the world of books as if that was all that mattered, unaware of the young people who swamp to the city for its so-called hip or international cachet, and who add profusely to global warming by commuting an hour each way every morning to their overpaid jobs at Google and Apple and Sun Microsystems and have never read anything remotely resembling a paperback apart from their iPhones and their Blackberries.
“Sure none of my neighbors do that,” he said, taking my money and handing me a receipt.

“Oh, my next door neighbor does, and I’m even further away. Every morning at 5.45 he heads off to Cisco down in San Jose. Over 60 miles each way. It’s crazy.”

(I didn’t even begin to go into the other things my neighbor does. He is a truly pathetic individual. He probably earns a fortune, and could employ half the population of Michoacan to do his yard work, but instead he spends his weekends waltzing his leaf blower around his lawn until every pathetic little leaf is gone and the lawn resembles a golf course. Or I suppose it does, I can’t see it because he has a fence to keep out the Huns all around it. Hours and hours of commuting and working for a huge corporation without even Amélie Nothomb for comic relief, then every weekend producing noise like jet reactors and fossil fuel polluting the bucolic neighborhood for no one’s benefit but his putting green lawn. You know this man has a serious problem.

You read it first, on this blog: I’m moving. I tried to ask him once to cut down on the leaf-blowing and was told to get out of his yard. I called the sheriff but those guys stick together.)

I left Stacey’s with a smile and a redolent sadness. I pictured the little old man in his Victorian with his old-fashioned neighbors, playing cards on Saturday nights. Or, if he was alone he’d be reading Proust, or Arthur C. Clarke. He didn’t know what software developers were, how they’ve fornicated California with their money and their SUVs and their leaf blowers. He was an innocent, a last holdout of a dying species.

Shops have closed all over. In downtown Mill Valley yesterday I counted no less than seven empty shops that were once thriving businesses: a kitchenware shop run by two gays. The legendary Village Music that sold vinyl LPs and catered to the Rolling Stones and the greats of jazz alike. The little tea and coffee outlet where I bought my coffee beans and my imported English Earl Grey and wine gums. The original, first, pre-corporate Banana Republic. A lovely gift shop. The equally legendary Sweetwater bar (which, rumor has it, may move into the gift shop). A trendy Italian kitchenware shop (that’s it, too many kitchen shops). And this is just in little Mill Valley–a rich bedroom community that ought to know better. At least the bookstore is still alive…

For me, these are all signs. Of course I’m not moving just because of a leaf blower. But the day the only people left in San Francisco are software developers and their ilk–geeks and googlers and leaf blowers–we can be fairly certain Stacey’s will be no more. I don’t want to be here when that happens.

Today we had the first of our “winter storms.” Read—where California is concerned—heavy, relentless rain, and wild winds, up to 80 miles an hour. Trees across the road. Surges of waves in the normally tranquil bay. Power outages for sure, up to a million homes, from Santa Rosa to San Jose. Traffic disrupted, accidents, freeway closures.
All of these things have happened. Hurricane force winds, said the radio.

At 8:00 a.m. I decided—unilaterally—to stay home. It’s a Friday, and I should have been at work, on a quiet, end of holiday season day; but when I looked out the window and saw the madness—tree branches and debris on my patio, my little cottage vibrating like a sailboat at its moorings, and just my imagination telling me what crossing the Golden Gate Bridge in a rickety, American public transit bus would be like—I took the decision. (See the photo of my usual number 4 commuter bus below…) Don’t think I had a free day, an enjoyable day off similar to a holiday. I was unspeakably bored. Because the power went out at 4 a.m. and has still not returned sixteen hours later; the light from outdoors was dim and uncooperative: Thou shalt not read, sayeth the Lord. Candles are of little use when you have a 530 page novel to plough through; and this blog is being written on precious battery time (3:31 at the moment, and I also have a film to watch).

Above all, what I want to say about global storming: the need to listen. The need to hear the sound of the wind and rain and to understand what the weather is saying: surrender. Stay home, accept that there are stronger forces, don’t try to go against nature. Light your candles, hunker down.

My landlady, bless her, was efficient, all day. Americans are nothing if not excellent copers, in some instances anyway—think 9/11, or the San Francisco Earthquake in 1989. (Katrina is another matter.) A tree has fallen on the cottage next door, just down from where I live, and which is part of her property. The tenant, a young woman who keeps to herself (as I do, I admit) seemed to be very distressed, despite the fact that the tree has not actually damaged the roof: all morning, in the driving rain, she ferried her belongings to her car in garbage bags. Yes, I should have offered to help, but I sat in the window, watching her go by, bewildered by her panic and by my own inertia. My calm due, perhaps, to memories of being on a 30-foot sailboat in such weather: the Pacific Ocean, the utter solitude, the trenchant knowledge that You Deal With It. Weather, unforgiving and implacable: you learn, you accept, you surrender. Her house is intact but she has fled. Perhaps the creek below the house, subject to flooding (although it never has), has frightened her too. My neighbor has not been on a sailboat, does not know that, in comparison, this storm is nothing. A downpour, some gusts of wind. The sheriff came, the fire department came, they were as offhand as I am. My landlady moved on to the next stage: fix it, and all afternoon a pair of brave, smiling Latinos chopped down what remained of the guilty tree. Poor tree; it would not have fallen again, given the direction of the wind; but something had to take the blame.

For me, the worst of the day—once the worst of the storm had passed—was the boredom. Without power: no Internet, no DVDs, no good light for reading. I slept (when the noise of the chipper did not wake me), I finished knitting a sweater. When the wind dropped I took the car into the center of town, enjoying the classical music on the radio. Eerie: there was no power in town either, I have never seen the place look so abandoned, so forlorn. Like a nuclear attack. Other cars circled as I did, desperate at the lack of entertainment, the impossibility of buying or consuming or enjoying. I stopped and made phone calls on my temperamental cell phone and found myself talking to a friend in New Orleans (though she doesn’t live there, and I did not know I would find her having a drink, overlooking Bourbon Street): fine weather, she said, we’re sitting outside, it’s downright Mediterranean, wish you were here. Instead, I was in a deserted parking lot, pondering the peculiar happiness that a power outage can bring, if you can overlook the boredom: candles, an eighteenth-century slowness to life. An appreciation of nature, of the present moment. I decided to go and visit friends who live nearby, once I’d been assured the roads were clear. She is 9 1/3 months pregnant; her husband went to work today and dealt with the nightmare of public transit and confusion that I’d avoided. I scolded him for leaving his wife; I’ve already been scolded by colleagues, he replied cheerfully: now, blissfully, a moot point. He won’t have to go in to work tomorrow, as it’s Saturday. We drank wine and enjoyed the candles and she and I agreed how boring the day could be, without power.

And yet I love this weather, when my fear leaves me alone: it reminds me of my time on the sailboat, and the intensity of feeling alive; it reminds me that we are here by the grace of nature, after all. And the planet, our mother, scolding us as I had unkindly scolded my friend. There have always been tempests and storms, and God knows in California they are mild on a global scale. But strong enough still to remind us to slow down, to stop our trying to be efficient and productive, to stay home with our pregnant wives and not flee in panic at a heavy branch on the roof. Life will be good: while I was at my pregnant friend’s house we looked out at the window at an uncanny light, as if the sun were trying, desperately at twilight, to break through the thickness of storm cloud. An apocalyptic, yellow, tender light: so rare, yet how privileged we were to see it, and to know what we were seeing.
(Storm photos courtesy SF Chronicle).

We took off at one o’clock in the morning: the plane was full, long gone the days of having three seats to oneself on such a flight (my last full row to myself flight was on a red-eye a year before 9/11…) I was trapped moreover in a middle seat, but my neighbors on either side were quiet and slim and like me, wanted only to grab three hours’ sleep before landing in Dallas.

Alas, my seat would not recline. However I pressed the button or pushed on the back, it would not budge from its righteous upright position, declaiming that it was forever ready for take off and landing and would have none of this pretending to be a luxurious first class recliner, even if I did bring my own inflatable pillow. Fortunately, the flight attendant was sympathetic, and after a bit of a kerfuffle which involved moving my aisle seat neighbor and lifting the seat cushion and performing some magic on the seat’s hidden gears, he made my seat recline: I was ready to sleep.

A ping from the loudspeaker warned us that we would be going through turbulence and reminded us to have our seatbelts fastened. A brief grope in the dark did not find my seat belt in its usual place so I assumed that when the flight attendant had fixed my seat he had pushed the belt to the side; I would find it before landing. So I placed my hands over my blanket and nodded off, with unsettling pictures of air pockets and my head banging against the ceiling of the aircraft replacing the sugar plums that should be more appropriate at this time of year.

Still, the turbulence was mild and I managed to doze until we were told to prepare for landing. My seat, now comfortably resigned to being lazy, would only go upright with the help of the passenger behind me, and a hurried search for the seat belt in the dim light turned up nothing. In vain I tried to get the flight attendant’s attention but soon realized I would be landing without a seat belt.

Driving without a seat belt is one thing. Many of us do it—I never buckle up on short local trips, although I know like everyone about the percentage of accidents occurring near home, etc…and years of driving in cars where seat belts were designed for tall Swedish men and act more like a guillotine on short dark-haired women has made me resist them for other physiological safety reasons. Flying without a belt however is quite a novelty. I first flew in 1958 and I think we had belts back then too. No take-off or landing is complete without the seat belt; the vocabulary is anchored into our collective unconscious, in any number of languages or formulae: please make sure your seat belt is securely fastened…merci de garder votre ceinture attachée…bitte schallen Sie sich an… until the pilot has switched off the fasten-seatbelt-sign…

I felt like an atheist in the church, like a sinner in the presence of a saint. I felt guilt: tremendous, nagging, I-am-doing-something-very-wrong transgressive guilt. It was more the sense of transgression and disobedience that rankled me than the notion that I might be in any physical danger: apart from the big bad air pocket which on very rare occasions might cause the plane to fall and the passengers to bounce skyward, or a severely botched landing which I have never experienced in fifty years of flying four or five times a year (so much for my carbon footprint….), the idea that a flimsy belt could save my life has always struck me as rather ludicrous, almost as bad as the flotation device or the life jacket or the air mask.

The closer to the ground we got (look! all those houses belonging to people who voted for George Bush!), the stranger I felt, and after a while I began to enjoy my unattached sinfulness. How often do you get the chance to do something so strictly forbidden? Would there be a fine waiting for me upon landing, an air marshal to escort me to the room for bad passengers who try to smoke in the toilet or open the door, or make inappropriate remarks about post-9/11 air travel? (A French colleague was once brutally collared and interrogated—despite diplomatic immunity—at Logan for joking about the bomb in her bag…) Or would I catapult into the seat in front of me and end up in the Dallas E.R. and lie there with sad thoughts about President Kennedy?

Of course none of these things happened. I gripped the armrests and we landed gently and safely, and no one was any the wiser.

How much of our sense of safety comes from within rather than without? There are people who are inherently afraid of flying, of leaving their doors or windows open or unlocked, of walking through city streets at night, of going to certain countries they’ve heard negative things about. And yet there is no absolute where safety is concerned, as inadequate “airport security” has proven time and unfortunate time again. A terrorist determined to blow up a plane will find new ways to circumvent existing precautions. Inversely, the burglar who sees an open window may assume (one hopes) that there must be nothing worth stealing.

On the next leg of my trip to the Deep South, thirty minutes into the flight the pilot announced we would be turning around and flying back to Dallas because of a faulty fuel gauge. We were actually halfway there: wouldn’t it have made more sense to keep on flying rather than waste all that time and fuel? We were in no great danger, the pilot told us so himself, but there were moments when I wondered if he were not lying to us, and every change in engine noise made me nervous in a way I had not been with my missing seat belt. If we were in real danger there wouldn’t be much he could do; all he wanted was to avoid a panic, understandably. All I could do was sit there with my seatbelt fastened and look at more homes of people who had voted for Bush.

There is a vast, and necessary, collusion among human beings where air safety is concerned. Air travel is so unnatural, so environmentally dangerous, that the only way to get people to go 30,000 feet into the air in a vibrating tin can is to delude them into thinking that they are safe. And, most of the time, they are, securely fastened into the modern way, the accepted norm. It’s hard to go against it, hard to find safer ways to travel, or to live. But the more we believe the collusion, the less safe we feel.

Try it some time, leave your belt unfastened beneath your blanket. Just don’t listen too closely to the engine.

If you google “Words, words, words, I’m so sick of words,” never so eloquently stated as by Julie Andrews in her incarnation as Eliza Doolittle, you will find a whole stream of bloggers et al. who feel the same. Being sick of words, I did not take the time to explore why they were sick of words; suffice to say, it seems a common enough ailment. It is also why I have not been on this blog for a while. There were just no words left over for self-expression…

At the recent (what, six weeks ago?!) conference of the American Translators’ Association, one of the presenters gave a talk on her profession and confessed she no longer did crossword puzzles. By the end of an entire day spent translating, she couldn’t bear the idea of any more words. It was time to walk the dog, listen to music, watch a film. I listened in dismay: if I am to become a full-time translator, will I lose the pleasure of crosswords? Is it that strenuous a profession?

I adore crossword puzzles; they are a pleasure equaled only by certain types of chocolates, Beethoven sonatas on a rainy afternoon, and other things not mentionable on this blog if I don’t want more spam than I already have. So imagine being a chef and getting sick of profiteroles, or a musician fed up with sonatas, or a …well, we won’t go there.

On second thought, though, it is absolutely true that people can get sick of anything in excess, even the Guardian crossword puzzle. It’s your stomach or your brain that just shuts down, says That’s it, no more, please. It’s the Zorba and the cherries syndrome. Only when I sat in the conference room in dismay, I didn’t think it would hit me quite so soon.

In fact, I too have been gorging myself on cherries, Alexis. I’ve just sent off an 80,000 word manuscript of a translation to the publisher, and for four months it’s been cherries at dawn every day. A book I have loved and whose characters I will miss as if they were friends who had moved too far away. But the stress of keeping up the pace to meet a deadline, not to mention the interruptions from less welcome visitors in the form of other translations of a more pedestrian nature, have ensured that on more than one evening my brain looked and felt like alphabet soup. The other night I began to watch a DVD and discovered with absolute delight that given its vintage (1933) it was virtually silent: what a pleasure to watch a story unfold without using words, just images!

Which led me to wonder in a moment of Sci-Fi abstraction if we are not heading back that way. If a few centuries or even decades from now the written word and printed page will be as obsolete as the papyrus—for sure, people have already talked about the death of the book, but won’t a day come when not only literature will be dead but also any form of writing? We will have icons on our computers that can do everything; our art forms will be visual; everything will be recorded by video, webcams, computers. No more need to translate divorce papers—send the video and a software program will translate and dub the judge’s pronouncement. Of course there will be another form of literacy—computer literacy—but images and speech will replace the records which once were the property of ink and paper. People are lazy; already teenagers hate to read, at least in the industrialized countries; Harry Potter may merely be the swan song of juvenile love for books.

If you read Doris Lessing’s Nobel Acceptance Speech, she refers to “the inanities of the internet”, meaning all the activities that require absolutely no reading. I know what she is referring to, for in my sudden crossword withdrawal seizure, I turned to YouTube (horrors) in search of silly amusement. And there is plenty of that; oddly enough, I ended up in stitches over a pair of elegant tabby cats who were on a bed… conversing in a very civilized manner. Back to words, of a feline variety; my own cat was furious and growled viciously and kept looking behind the computer screen for whatever wizard was responsible for this tomfoolery.

But I’ve gone off track. The thing is, I love words, written and spoken, but mainly written. Each word has its own resonance, history, music, an elegance on the page; putting them together I feel like a toddler with building blocks, endlessly happy and eager, even when they spill. I even succeeded in using the word Brobdingnagian in my translation: take an odd word in French (sidéral) that warrants something equally fantastical in English…It will probably get axed by the editor, but it was worth a shot. There are times when there is an aching gap in a sentence, in a passage, that is nothing if not reminiscent of a crossword puzzle.

My daughter’s favorite cartoon as a child was a collection of little blue people called the Schtroumpfs…still not totally forgotten as Smurfs in English, Puffi in Italian… If you ever read or watch one of the stories, you soon discover that they frequently pepper their speech with their own name, when they don’t know or can’t think of the right word (or it hasn’t been invented yet). A sort of fill in the blank with the blank; when I do a first draft on a translation, those pesky French words that resist translation (like anything self-respectingly French) are rendered in English as “smurf.” (This is an even greater insult to the original text when you remember that the gentleman who invented the Schtroumpfs was Belgian, or should I say Walloon). This gives something like:

“There is Leo snoring away like a smurf in the TV armchair.”

(I’ll send you a free book if you can guess what the smurf became in this sentence).

It has always proved a very effective means of finding the right word in a subsequent rereading. I’m no longer magnetized by the original French, and the word just pops up nine times out of ten—like a crossword puzzle…

So, back to words and cherries: like anything—and this was Zorba’s lesson—they must be consumed in moderation. Will I be able to make a living as a translator if I get sick of words? Will it spoil the thing I hold dearest after family and friends?

Perhaps the trick will be to do the crosswords at dawn, when my mind is rested from the night’s silent film. Otherwise, I might have to teach my cat to go for walks, something I can imagine he will not take terribly kindly to. He’d much rather look for phantom cats behind the computer screen.

Every year I would think to myself, who would I like to win the Nobel prize for literature? And most of my own personal nominees were either dead or not quite of the stature of a Nobel prizewinner, and very often not male enough. Or they’d won it already. But I would often think, quite wistfully, of Doris Lessing, that if she were awarded the prize, that would be a worthy recognition by my own Nobel standards (Steinbeck, Pasternak, Seamus Heaney). But she was passed over so often, and was getting on, and it seemed as if she were going to get it, she would have got it by now. I assumed those gentlemen in Stockholm found her too little of a lady to their liking: too feisty and feminist, her work most definitely not male enough.

I had tears in my eyes this morning when I saw she had won the prize. It’s not that she’s my favorite author; it was the sense of justice being done, at last, of there being some hope for women in the world. For a number of reasons. To be fair, the Nobel prize committee has improved over the last 15 years, in giving four prizes to women (Morrison, Gordimer, Szymborska and Jelinek), but before that, there were only six altogether in nearly a hundred years…you do the gender math.

So this was one reason for hope, that the percentage of women whose work is acknowledged is increasing. Also, that much of her work deals with women’s lives and domesticity, hardly themes dear to male writers except when the women are catalysts or objects of men’s behavior, etc etc. Another reason is perhaps the very nature of the winner herself: a woman who all her life has flown in the face of convention, has done things on her own terms. Not that her Nobel women predecessors didn’t, but I sense their work matches more closely a man’s sensibility, honoring the committee’s criteria for what makes outstanding literature, even the outrageously depressing Jelinek…

I fell in love with Lessing’s work back in the 1970s, because she opened a world to me. The Grass is Singing, the Martha Quest books, The Summer before the Dark, The Golden Notebook, are all books I still remember, books that shaped my still impressionable twentysomething mind. They were strange and exotic in style and setting, but what was deeply familiar was the psychology: the sense of being on a planet where one would never fully belong, where all the rules and structures had been predetermined by men, and the best one could hope for was to meet nice men who would both protect one and allow one some freedom. I was living through a stifling relationship at the time, and I would escape into her words for comfort. I came back out again confused, but grateful, because she had shown me it was all right—it was imperative—to rebel. That same summer when someone stole both an amber ring and my copy of Summer before the Dark, I was more upset at the loss of the book.

Lessing went beyond just gender politics, she challenged race and capitalism and imperialism, expanding her borders as a woman by participating fully in the male world, at least on paper. And beyond the real world too: she had a vision in Shikasta that has also stayed with me, however little I like “science fiction,” of a world filled with justice and love, as if the genes for violence and greed had finally been eradicated from our bodies. Maybe this vision seems sentimental, in retrospect, but because of my very resistance to science fiction, I trusted it; it worked for me.

She wrote other things I didn’t like (The Good Terrorist), and at times I thought she was searching too hard for subject matter, but this was because of her ever-curious mind, her need to understand and inspire change in people, in her readers. She played an admirable prank on the publishing industry, submitting two serious manuscripts under a pen name then exposing the venal practices of editors once they had roundly rejected her.

Most recently I read a series of novellas, The Grandmothers, and admired the sharpness of her prose, and her emotional recall; one of the stories, A Love Child, recaptures all the anguish of youth, of love and fear and separation and obsession, as vividly as if she had just lived it herself. Which is a hopeful thing too, to have her as this wonderful role model, when you’re not getting any younger yourself, living proof that the life of the mind does not age.

(There is also an utterly trivial reason why I’m pleased, Doris Lessing loves cats, and has written three books about them…)

Above all it is the feeling that beyond gender a certain sensibility has been rewarded. And if you have ever known a book to change your life, you cannot help but feel that there is some hope and justice and understanding in the world, after all, when Doris Lessing wins the Nobel prize.

The first film I had already seen twice, and was ready to see again, remembering it as one of those films which, if you are a woman, you see all too rarely and which leave you with a sense of possibility and freedom, a glimpse into another world where things might be done differently. And even in our own world, occasionally they are. Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career did very well when it came out in 1979, and it was somewhat revolutionary in its depiction of a young woman, Sybylla (played by Judy Davis) who turns down the Perfect Husband (Sam Neill) for her tentative career as a writer. I should mention at this point that they were clearly in love—no arranged marriage here. I think this film—like The Piano fifteen years later—could only have been made Down Under, and by a woman; there’s a sense of space, a pioneering rawness in the exploration of emotions that allows things to be said that Americans or Europeans, or men, might find either too trivial or too bold. While the film has lost its revolutionary feminist originality, and would probably not even be made today (although one sometimes wonders if it isn’t time for a 21st century version…) it remains fresh and beautifully filmed and acted, set in the outback at the turn of the last century, a charming mixture of Victorian lace and the sheep dip.

An older film, with a more recent setting, is Late Spring, by Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. It was made in 1949, just after the war, and is the story of a widowed man who uses gentle deceit to oblige his daughter to marry. Noriko is played by Setsuko Hara, a radiant young woman as sweet as Judy Davis is saucy; but like her Australian counterpart, Noriko does not want to marry. It’s not that she has a brilliant career ahead of her; she loves the life she has with her father, she loves riding her bicycle by the shore, the man she might have loved has gone elsewhere. She has everything she needs or wants, but she lives in a patriarchal society that cannot tolerate unmarried women. So even though he’ll have no one to look after him, Noriko’s father forces her out of the house and into an arranged marriage. We never see Noriko’s husband, and she fades from the story just as her smile faded, leaving us with the memory of her sad, tearful gaze.

Sybylla, on the other hand, smiling dreamily, gazed off beyond the sunset into the larger world, where her manuscript would be published to great acclaim and success. And this was not altogether a fiction: the author of the original book, Miles Franklin, never married and went on to become one of Australia’s most successful early writers.

What was so striking about the second film, despite its predictable, sad outcome, was the sympathy which Ozu seemed to have for his heroine. He seems to be saying, in this film, and in another one entitled Early Summer, Why can’t Noriko live the life she wants? And at the same time, Why is she different from other Japanese women of her time? Throughout the film the women characters mark the transition from old to new, from kimono to the latest fashion; was Noriko eager to explore the change of the years just after the war, or did she simply have a more independent nature? We never really know, as Westerners. We cannot apply our own socio-cultural logic to the film, in the end. What is clear is that, unlike Sybylla, she had no choice.

Watching these two films back to back has made me wonder why there are not more women like Sybylla and Noriko, especially nowadays when the Brilliant Career is a given. Perhaps my own circle is a bad example, or simply through some fault of synchronicity or coincidence I do not run into young women who defy the still prevalent social injunction to marry, but wherever I look, whomever I talk to among female friends—young, older, married, single—no one comes forth with the example of the defiant eligible woman who remains single by choice, turning down what looks like a dream life with Sam Neill on a huge Australian farm…

I have my own little theory about this. If we had been raised in the Australian outback like Miles/Sybylla where practically the only men we ever saw were loud vulgar dirty drunken sheep farmers, and the only prospect before us was that of being such a sheep farmer’s wife, would we not want to dream up an alternative? Even Sam Neill for all his good looks and refined manners and wealth could not offer Sybylla a life as glorious as the one she had imagined for herself all through her adolescence. She had the force of character to imagine a world beyond the bush.

Whereas for us benighted souls of the twenty-first century…the bush is filled with Hollywood, and pop psychology, and dating sites, and the eternal insidious female gossip that nurtures the assumption that one must marry, or at least find a partner, in order to feel brilliant. We are as bound to tradition in many ways as Noriko in her Japanese village. Even when we argue against marriage, we are saying God doesn’t exist—well, if he doesn’t exist, why are you trying to prove he doesn’t?

I know that all over the world there are pockets of resistance, hard fought corners of feminism and defiance, but they are ghettoes, with their own forms of socio-cultural coercion, and I’m not sure I want to go there. They are places full of theory, and anger—often righteous, I don’t question that—and a kind of reclusion. No, I want the world that Sybylla let us glimpse, and that Noriko longed for. A place of exuberance and possibility, of self-fulfillment on one’s own terms, absolutely. Exhilaration, riding your bicycle by a deserted shore. Call it freedom if you like; perhaps it’s selfish, and that’s why it hasn’t been allowed to flower, why we are still coerced into something we say cannot be submission, not in this day and age, but it is. Submission of our real selves to the fairy story, the need to please others, to please society.

One of my friends who has resisted since the break-up of her marriage 20 years ago, but watched with some dismay as her daughter postponed her studies in order to marry, speaks of the violence in male-female relationships caused by the struggle for power. Clearly, to choose one’s own path is to allot the power to oneself, to struggle for achievement rather than power within a relationship and against another person. But what of tenderness, of intimacy, of solidarity, I ask my friend, after some reflection. (Not to mention the other usual criteria, like children or sex or sharing a roof.)

We both grew thoughtful in the midst of our God-is-dead discussion. How often do people—individually or as a couple—use up their allotted measure of tenderness, see it consumed in the struggle for power? Are the months or years of tenderness worth the price one may—or may not—pay? There’s no easy answer. And the fact we are still talking about these failures or disappointments, years later, makes us wonder what went wrong—and why do we even care, still, to talk about renewing such experiences, nurturing hope or illusions?

More synchronicity: in the bus yesterday I read an excellent tribute by Zadie Smith to Zora Neale Hurston. At the (precocious) age of 14, Zadie initially resisted reading Ms. Hurston, fearful she would find just another book about “love tribulations of women.” Ah-hah: this is the attitude that makes for brilliant careerhood—and, as we know, Ms. Smith has fulfilled everyone’s expectations. Miles Franklin would have been proud. Although Ms. Smith did marry, after her initial success. However, I seem to recall reading an article a few years ago where she said she wanted to take a break from writing, that she wanted to have a life that wasn’t a “literary life.”

Well, one could argue that there are women who have it all. Who know how to have it all, who have that kind of power. While the rest of us endure our tribulations, or dream of alternative routes.

Sometimes I think it’s all a myth. That women are driven to romance just as men are driven to power and wealth. I feel cheated: we’re fed this crap from infancy, and it takes extraordinary circumstances to resist it and find out who we really can be—the true nature of our power.

But this is a big topic, and I’m merely scratching the surface at the moment. I would like other people’s ideas on the subject. In the meantime, here’s my provisional conclusion: if that’s what it takes, in my next life, I’m reserving a spot next to the sheep dip. And Sam Neill, watch out.

He seemed to leave his presence behind in places he had been, a shadow, an echo. The Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco where he had once performed for free and al fresco, or so I was told, before I moved there. A street in Mostar in Bosnia where there was a music school for children that he had founded after the war.

It’s just hard to imagine a world without him; he belongs to that tiny group of people that you grow up with, your own generation or the one just ahead of you, who define your world as a better place, a place worth sticking around as long as you can, even if it’s just to watch reruns of The Three Tenors.

I went through Modena on the train about six months ago. I kept looking for balsamic vinegar distilleries. I didn’t know he lived there, or I might have shouted out the window, Ciao, Luciano!

Life has just gotten that bit smaller, and shorter. And this time Ciao seems to mean, So long, Luciano.  There’s a strange silence on the planet now, the place your voice used to fill.