I look down on my desk to see my two copies of George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". One, a Greek translation was given to me as a present from a dear friend before I left for Barcelona back in 2006. The other, a translation into Spanish with a wonderful cover, featuring a rare photo of Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) himself, was given to me as farewell present by a very good friend right before leaving Barcelona to come back to Greece. Books, ideas and literature transverse time, space and people's minds trying to defy boundaries. The boundaries themselves draw equatorial lines around our lives. As we move tangentially around these boundaries, it appears that our lives are making circles. But they aren't.
I look outside my window and recognize a familiar view. It is like spring in Greece since I came back to Athens yesterday and by 6pm the setting sun, lights up the antena-infested skyline I can see through my bedroom window, with my desk strategically positioned so that I can face outside. The view is nothing like the one I had from the 4th floor Bioinformatics lab until last Friday, the sea is emphatically missing but it could be worse.
There is a scene in "Howard's End" where one of the main characters, "brittishly" arrogant and genuinely phlegmatic lets out a silly aphorism which goes something like this:
"My father says there's only one great view, and that is the view of the sky over our heads"
Somewhere among some old photos I took before leaving Athens in 2006, somewhere among the published photos of the blog I kept while I was in Barcelona, I found the one that appears at the top of this post. My old colleagues may still be able to see it hanging on the lab wall over my old screen (if Pedro who inherited my desk has not made any radical changes yet).
As I have been in Greece for only two days, I am still trying to cope with simple things I have become unfamiliar with. Trying not te be run over by cars while crossing the street or getting used to the idea that taxi drivers (sometimes even bus drivers) will smoke without asking any permission. The feeling that you have to get to know your own country after sometime has something charmingly unsettling. One needs a set of references to get by, at least in the beginning.
Looking out of the window it's good to see that the view of the sky over our heads seems to have remained reassuringly constant.
