Within moments of landing in Czechoslovakia (as it was then still called) in the late spring of 1990, I could sense a country in hurried and dramatic transition yet keeping intact a quirky and ironic soul. The currency clerk at the Prague airport seemed befuddled about the correct exchange rate between US dollars and Czech crowns, and he gave me a tiered rate roughly averaging the market rate. An hour later, as I was checking in to my hotel, the same fellow appeared in the lobby, looking even more flustered. He had tracked me down because he needed a few hundred crowns back or would have to pay the difference out of his own pocket. A week later, as I was leaving the country, the same teller exchanged my crowns back into dollars, with a shy smile of recognition. 

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Maybe so; but it can also calm the mind in unpredictable ways that staying home does not. This happened to me once before, when I returned to New York on the eve of 9/11, deeply imprinted by the tranquility I had experienced at a certain untamed garden in the South of France. As fear spread across America that September and in the months that followed, I kept returning in my mind to that garden, and regaining a center. And it happened again on the cusp of Covid-19.

The subject of death has shadowed me lately – not my own, but death more generally. Several acquaintances have recently died or are dying. As I get older, that seems to happen more frequently. It’s a universal human question – and therefore a quintessential liberal arts question: what does death mean? How should we face it?