He considered it a work of God's will.
Rhonda agrees with him whole-heartedly. And though I'm not inclined to think in those terms, if I
were, this would be a time I did.
We boarded the train from Vienna to Prague, wrestling
our bags into one of those wonderful European train compartments—seats facing
each other with considerable leg room rather than the packed rank-and-file of
airlines, an arrangement that encouraged conversation and community, rather
than simply getting from one place to another.
Facing your fellow passengers fosters a form of kindness: you are stuck
with each other for the duration (this trip promised to be five hours), so any
civilized person makes the best of it.
Nodding, smiles, all the amenities.
And there is nothing wrong with courtesy. It is an additional comfort on a long
sedentary trip where the body wants to stir and stand and stretch.
And the first encounter was charmingly polite. A man I would guess to be in his mid-forties
helped us hoist the luggage into the racks above our seat. I thought it was a very gracious gesture from
a fellow passenger, murmured my thanks, and was pleased to be addressed in
fluent English.
This had become one of the real amenities of our
trip. The Hungarians and Austrians had
been largely English-speaking (much to my relief, for as I mentioned in a
previous entry, a spotty acquaintance with Romance languages didn't get you far
in this part of Europe). Our good fortune continued with these travelers to
Prague. Vlado, the man I have mentioned,
was a businessman who, it seems, had a particular focus in communications, in
bringing together divergent interests—sort of the thing he would do on the
train that evening. With him was his
nephew David, a shrewd, witty young man of 17, and also the quiet Mojca, who
was reading Haruki Murakami (which made me like her immediately) and drowsing a
little: she was on her way to see her boyfriend, Vlado's son, Jan, who was
pursuing graduate study at Charles University in Prague. Already it was a kind of unexpected group we
were meeting—I began by assuming that David and Mojca were brother and sister,
Vlado's son and daughter—but there was a different set of relationships, those
involving outreach and extended family among the three of them, we discovered
at once.
Once we found ourselves among English-speakers and saw
that we could talk with them, the
question remained whether we would talk
with them. Vlado and I initiated a
polite back-and-forth: facing seats on a train may offer the chance for long
conversation, but it's still up to the passengers to take the offer, and I
think we both were mindful of honoring the other's privacy, if privacy was
wanted.
It turned out that conversation was welcome. Rhonda, who has a more attuned and welcoming
social sense than I do, joined in, and it looked like there was going to be
talk along the way from Vienna to Prague.
I hoped it would entertain us: Rhonda brings out the best in people she
talks with, so I had confidence that if we met the same kind of open regard
from our companions, this would be pleasant travel. So while she and Vlado talked, I struck up a
conversation with David—you can't teach in university as long as I have without
liking smart young people and being curious about what they have to say. David, it turned out, was interested in film—Mamet
and Tarantino were people he mentioned—and the talk ranged over Peter Jackson,
Tolkien, Tarentino's Inglourious Basterds,
while Vlado listened, contributed occasionally, then listened and smiled. Mojca and I talked about Murakami, which led
me to Kafka and the part of my trip to Prague that was pilgrimage, a journey to
the presence of one of the world's great writers (and, of course, one of my
favorites). Rhonda talked travel
experience (and a little politics) with our community, and the exchange moved
readily and comfortably through a number of topics.
What I noticed through all of this was Vlado's benign
presence. He had smart things to say,
mind you, but the smartest thing he seemed to do was listen. You could see that he enjoyed the talk, that
this was his home country—in the company of stories and ideas. It would make me think later that those of us
in education fail when we don't listen, that the lectern isn't always a place
to hold forth but often just as much a place of exchange. My best experiences in classrooms and in
conversations
 |
| With David |
When we reached the Praha hlavní nádraží (the "main station"--I just like spelling it out in Czech), Vlado gave me his email address and phone number, offering any kind of
favor or assistance we would need during our stay in the city. You don't presume on that hospitality, but I
decided to email him when I returned to the States (which I did, beginning what
I think will be a good correspondence) and figured that if our friendship
continued, it would continue over the miles and through letters to each other.
This is
where God's will comes in. Or dependent
arising, that Buddhist concept of the unfathomable and profound interconnection
of all people and things. Christmas
night, after we had eaten at a wonderful, small Czech restaurant not far from
the Old Town Square, Rhonda and I walked over to the Winter Markets, the
Astronomical Clock, and a promised tour of Haunted Prague, one of the more
touristy attractions we had anticipated.
More of the clock and the tour later: this entry is about the wonderful
synchronous texture of things.
 |
| With Vlado |
Standing
before one of the booths, contemplating souvenirs and taking in the smells of
Czech food and mulled wine (yes, the stomach can be full while the nose
indulges) I felt a hand on my shoulder, a voice proclaiming, "This time we
need to take a picture". Vlado had
spotted us in a crowded square, in a city whose population swells to two
million during the Markets, and we enjoyed the reunion for over an hour of real
camaraderie, of picking up the conversation where we left it. This time we met Vlado's son Jan, an amiable,
extremely bright young man with whom I tried to keep pace during a rangy dialogue
in which it was gratifying, as it always is, to find a young scholar still
taken with ideas rather than careerism—a quality I love to find (and find more
than outsiders would expect to find) in our own graduate students, that reminded me how
much I love doing what I do. And all
the while Vlado smiled, listened, spoke occasionally and always shrewdly, and
treated us to mulled wine that settled well when we said goodbye to our friends
and walked to the Astronomical Clock, to our journey through the back streets
of Prague among its many ghosts.
In our
exchange of emails that followed my return to the States, Vlado has offered his
help on a project I'm considering for the future—a travel seminar to Prague, a
trip for students preceded by a term-long study of modern fiction and film
rising out of this beautiful city. The spirit
of Prague moves through its stories and their profound interconnections that
center on the city itself. Vlado and his
family have offered their services as guides, but over the Christmas season
this year in Prague they began that guidance, into the bright and welcoming
soul of this splendid place.
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