Um. . . I'm not sure where I was or how I missed it, but it has just come to my attention that John Ashcroft, the Attorney General of the United States of America, performed on my birthday in 2002 a very nice song that he had written himself. You should watch.

In August of 1994, after having dropped out of the University of Illinois for the second and last time, I was living with my brother Mike and his family in a small town in northwestern Illinois, working as an apprentice in his one-man furniture-making business. Because I was a half-aloof half-shy burgundy-haired suburban intellectual indie-rocker guy, I had very little in common with the town-folk in my age bracket, many of whom had already gotten married, some of whom had already been divorced, some of whom were missing teeth. As a result, it was difficult for me to make friends, and I filled my free time with daily hours-long bike rides out in the surrounding countryside.

I hadn’t had many opportunities to escape the heartland when I was a teenager, and I longed to see what kind of mysteries lay beyond the corn-encrusted horizon. My first airplane trip was a college visit to Deep Springs in California when I was 17, and that trip was only the second time I’d ever been west of the Mississippi. I’d quit school in part because I felt woefully underexperienced in ways that no amount of schooling could remedy, and as the summer progressed my urge to get out of familiar surroundings and go somewhere new, anywhere, intensified until my bones hummed. Some in my family dismissed it as “wanderlust,” a temporary condition that occasionally afflicts post-adolescents until they get some sense, but from my point of view it simply could not be ignored. I decided to buy a van with my $600 in savings and travel the country a bit in order to figure out just what the hell I should do with my life. A friend of mine had hopped a freight train to New Orleans a year before and was living there with his girlfriend, so I decided it would be a convenient first leg of my open-ended journey to drive down to visit him for a while.

It soon became obvious that $600 was not going to buy me a road-worthy vehicle of any kind, let alone one of the cargo-hauling variety. A fixer-upper was out of the question, as I wouldn’t even have known how to change an air filter at the time. A couple of years later, when I finally was able to buy an old van, I had to ask my girlfriend, who had taken auto shop class in high school, how to change the oil.

What’s a young man without a van to do? Having no idea at the time that my character would soon enough come to be dominated by vanhood, I began exploring alternative transportation options. After doing some math, I calculated that with a little training I could ride my bike from northwestern Illinois to New Orleans in just over two weeks. That $600 would be more than enough to buy a tent and a decent bicycle. Suddenly, to my mother’s despair, the plan started coming together. In a nod to her healthy stockpile of tears, I agreed to delay my departure date until after her birthday in September.

One day amid the endless late-August seas of dry shoe-brown corn stalks, however, a gentle old man driving a maroon four-door sedan was a bit too nervous about crossing the yellow line when he passed the cyclist riding back into town near sunset after a long day, and the low loud dull thud with no warning knocked him from his bike and rolled him off the hood, rolled him along the pavement for many more feet in an incomprehensible blur of pain and whirlwinded asphalt and sky until he came to rest on his back blinking silently upward. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, chrome blue with charcoal clouds gliding slowly across it. He turned his head to notice the sedan’s brake lights glowing red in the dusk, and heard the long dry creak of the screen door on the nearest farmhouse opening and shutting and opening again as a group of voices gathered and began to frame the sky in a circle of concerned questions.

The ambulance arrived quickly, and there ensued a cursory interview about the order of events (“Well, . . . I was pedaling and then it hurt a lot and then I was lying on the ground in pretty much this exact position. There was a big blur in the middle somewhere.”) in which it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that right before the thud I had been thinking about how the cyclist sometimes doesn’t even notice that he has hit his ideal cadence, in which his breathing and pedaling slide seamlessly into lockstep gear-like rhythm, and how, when the rhythm of that cadence exactly matches the beat of, in this case, the first Don Caballero record, and in the descending darkness the horizon unrolls itself into the long slick black tongue of asphalt stretching out before him, the cyclist can easily believe that the song and the ride and the dusk and life itself will march endlessly on in this undeviating rhythm until the stars flicker and are snuffed out.

It ended up, after a couple of days in the hospital, several X-rays, and an MRI that I had fractured a vertebra in the middle of my back and ruptured a disk just above where it joins the pelvis. Despite my lack of helmet or padding of any kind, I had not a single external injury but a big scrape on the back of my calf. It obviously could have been a lot worse, but this strange turn of events nonetheless killed my plans for self-discovery by means of transcontinental recklessness. I instead tried my hand at self-discovery by means of lying in bed and being depressed for a couple of months. My brother was nice enough to carve me a cane, and I moped around his house with cane in hand wearing a hospital-white back brace that kept my back hyperextended and my chest thrust out in a mock display of machismo for the next eight weeks.

One year later, when the insurance company finally settled and my lawyer took his third, I bought the 1985 red and silver GMC van with a fully gray-and-green shag-carpeted interior that had belonged to my uncle who had died the previous summer. I spent much more than I should have on installing a stereo and a huge amplifier and speakers, and the first thing I did was to drive with a friend to Glacier National Park in Montana. We parked the van in gas station parking lots and on residential streets and slept on a mattress which fit perfectly between the wheel wells in the back. Throughout the trip we kept a log of all the diners we’d stopped in, how much their coffee had cost, the size of the mugs, and whether the waitress had called us “hon” or not.

A couple of years later, after the new bike I bought to replace the one that had been destroyed in the accident had been stolen out of the back of the van one night and pawned for crack money while it was parked in front of my loft on 23rd Street in Chicago, which forced me to buy yet another bike because my job as a bike messenger, one of the five or more disposable jobs I had that year, made me dependent on that bike for my income, at least for the month or so that I held the job, until riding all day in the September rains, in combination with a sub-par work ethic and a diffused sense of being owed something, made me unable to do it anymore; a couple of years later, like I said, I brushed a gallon of black enamel house paint onto that van and drove straight down the black-tongued highway, stopping neither for sunset nor sunrise nor anything else except coffee and fuel toward my new home in New Mexico. People sometimes glance nervously upward at you when you pull up next to them at a stoplight in a black van. Sometimes it’s obvious that they’re not looking. The wrong kind of girls look at you more steadily and a lot more often, even if you’re not wearing sunglasses.

Eventually, after having served as my band’s tour van, after driving to New Mexico and back a few times and a couple of trips to the Pacific and one to the Atlantic, after acquiring a lot of rust and a few dents and after most of the interior electrical stuff had ceased to function at all, that van also ceased to be a van, in the sense that it would no longer go anywhere, and was towed from the parking lot of a community rec center in Santa Fe, never to be seen by me again.

My back, which healed surprisingly well within a few months of the accident, hurts almost daily now in the place where the disk ruptured. Three mornings before we were supposed to get on a train to go spend three weeks of our Christmas break in Berlin with C.’s entire nuclear family, I felt a certain gooey slipping sensation at the base of my spine while I was tying my shoe, and the accompanying pain grew slowly over the next 24 hours until the following morning, when I found myself completely unable to get out of bed. I remained in bed in fact for three days, except for a trip to the doctor’s office, and I was able to make the trip to Berlin in the end thanks only to prescription pain-killers and anti-inflammatories. The pain is much better now, but I have to be very when I run to catch trams, very careful about what position I sleep in, or else I find it difficult to sit or stand for any length of time the following day without enduring a throbbing ache that says that the fluid-filled sac that used to so devotedly and lovingly cushion my fifth lumbar and first sacral vertebrae from each other has been reduced to the consistency of a medium-rare cheeseburger.

Nonetheless, today I went for a long and glorious two-hour bike ride in the obliquely-angled late-afternoon sun among the soft rolling wheat fields and vineyards of southern Moravia, a ride which in my present state of spinal unhealth is an achievement of which I am proud. Although the seat on this bike is the wrong shape and makes my prostate go numb after half an hour, and although I have to treat my back gingerly now and cannot make the same powerful pedal strokes I used to, and although I now often use the brakes to control my speed when arcing down curving hillside roads between blurred wheat fields and the flickering patchwork shadows of trees because I am nervous about flying out of control and hurting my back in a fall, still: Nothing compares to the cyclist’s joy at breathing the immortal air under the invincible sun.

Today’s ride was on a bike trail that runs from Brno all the way down to the Austrian border. (Actually, it’s called the South Moravian Vineyard Trail, or something similar, which I think is so named because in the summertime you are encouraged to punctuate your ride through the hillsides and small villages with pit stops at pubs featuring locally produced wines.) Today I made it about one-third of the way to the border. Once things calm down at the university and C. goes to Scotland for two weeks, I plan on riding all the way there one day.

It’s silly, I know, but I always feel like a giant when I put in an afternoon on my bicycle and find, after returning home all sweaty and shaky-kneed, that my afternoon’s pedaling traces out a tiny but visible arc on a globe. Find the Czech Republic on one, and find Brno in the southeast. Imagine the line between Brno and Vienna to the south, and picture me pedaling there on roads too tiny to see among the wheat fields in the late afternoon sun. Regardless of whether my desire to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond the strip malls and mulch circles of suburban Illinois can be dismissed with anything so simple as an abstract noun, that’s where I am.

The school year is practically over, and classes no longer meet. The only job responsibilities that remain are administering exams, returning essays, and saying good-bye. Since we had no classes to teach, C. and I went exploring earlier this week to an area of the country called Wallachia, which is largely inhabited by the descendents of a migrant group of shepherds who moved to Silesia (in the Czech-Slovak-Polish borderland) about 500 years ago. The town we visited, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, is famed for its open-air museum that features a number of wooden houses that have been relocated from throughout the region and set up to form a working village. I mention wooden houses specifically because they are actually very rare here. Avid readers might recall my previous missive about how love-struck the Czechs are with stucco, and I can only reinforce that idea. Everything I've seen in Brno and elsewhere is brick and stucco, or cinderblock and stucco, so Wallachia rightly makes a big deal of what it likes to call its "Little Wooden Town." And, in fact, due to how love-struck the Czechs also are with diminutives, the makers of the signs and brochures in Rožnov assiduously translated the diminutive of město (městičko) as Little Town. It just served to underscore how quaint the place was anyway.

Not only quaint, but fairly distinctive as well is Rožnov. The way of life of these migrant shepherds with their origins shrouded in mystery was noticeably different from that of their neighboring Slavs. (Past tense because they have modernized just like everyone else and assimilated into the population at large.) While walking through the Little Wooden Town, however, I assumed that these tiny buildings—where 11 children slept in one room and all the cooking for the entire family was done in a closet-sized windowless enclosure—dated from the mid-nineteenth century or earlier, and was very surprised to read on the placard outside one of the typical houses that it was occupied in its original setting until the mid-1950s.

I was also attacked by a dickhead goose while talking to a pig at one of the homesteads, but it doesn't deserve much comment.

On our second day in Rožnov we went hiking in the mountains outside of town, looking for the Little Wooden Church and a stone statue of Radegast, an old pagan god after whom a local brew has affectionately been named. It started raining, and we lost the trail, and we never did find the statue. The tourist brochures in Rožnov had made it sound interesting because of the way they referred to Radegast as an old pagan god who had been replaced by Christ in the middle ages, as though the changing of religions is perhaps as monumental as the changing of long-distance phone companies. "Honey, it looks like the Christians have a deal where we'd get Eternal Salvation and a chance to win a roller-skating date with God in the Kingdom of Heaven, and Radegast, well, he's just got those same old smoky fires and virgin sacrifices and stuff, so do you want to go with Christ, or what?”

Mike, our friend and colleague, used this phrase last night to describe Czech society in the aftermath of communism. As I told him, life under communism is one of the things I was most curious about before coming over here, and one of the things about which I've discovered least since arriving. People simply don't want to talk about it very much, for two reasons. The first is that those 40 years are now a bad memory, and people have been trying to put it behind them ever since. The second reason, the importance of which I had completely neglected in my own thinking, is that so many people were "compromised" under the system. That is, in order to survive under that system, almost everyone had to sacrifice something of themselves; almost everyone was guilty of some degree of complicity in the name of pragmatism. The extent to which people were willing to sacrifice was perhaps greater than one might think, given that, in the pre-revolution mindset, the communist system would last into perpetuity. It never occurred to people simply to "hold out" until 1989, when it would end.

Dr. Charles Hall, our teacher at the TEFL summer school in Pilsen last summer, was in Prague on a Fulbright during the revolution in 1989. He described for us some of the tactics used by the government to turn that complicity to their advantage. Say, for instance, that Mr. Novak wanted to leave the country to travel to England for a week. He was, most likely, denied permission to leave. If for some reason, however, his request was granted, at the last minute a representative of the party might visit his home and give him a package to deliver to someone in England. If he refused, his permission to go was denied. If he accepted, he suddenly found himself acting as an agent of the Communist Party. Were Mr. Novak to cause any trouble later, or were the government later to need Mr. Novak to provide some information about, say, a friend or family member, they had evidence that he had been an agent of the party. "Do you want your wife to know, Mr. Novak, that you work for us? Do you want your children to know? Of course not. . ."

Tactics such as these, and in general the culture of mistrust created by them, conspired to destroy the interpersonal bonds that are necessary for any functional society to exist. "Civil society," Mike called it, quoting an historical Czech figure that he admires. Dr. Douglas Pressman, a sociologist I interviewed last year for the English Department newsletter, had published an article in Vital Speeches of the Day in which he referred to the force that binds together the individuals in a society as "social capital." As Dr. Pressman explains,

. . . Just as businesses need to invest in new factories and equipment and just as people require investments in education and health care, a society runs better when its institutions encourage trust and cooperation. Indeed, an economically developed society requires and operates from a base of robust social norms in combination with vital social networks; formal norms such as those embodied in contract law and government regulations simply cannot be effective and efficient without this base. Voluntary political, civic and religious associations--which are inherently time-consuming--are the warp and weft of what [Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone (2000)], borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, termed "social capital."

It's not the case that every Czechoslovakian citizen was a willing and eager agent of the party. Some were; others, such as Mr. Novak, had no choice but to act as agents of the party; some were completely uninvolved. As a result, in Czechoslovakia under communism, one simply never knew who to trust. Whatever the motivations of the individuals in question, the end result was that the government had largely succeeded in breaking the bonds between individuals. The possible exception to this was family, because the trust that exists between flesh-and-blood relatives is significantly harder to break. Mike posits that people could generally trust their own family not to rat them out even under duress, and further, that the government knew this and rarely tried to force the issue.

This explains why family is so important to Czechs. Without examining it too much, I've all along been assuming that family forms such a cornerstone of the society because there was so little else in the way of consumerism and vacuous entertainment for 40 years. The importance of family in Czech society seems similar to how I imagined life was in the '40s and '50s in America, before pop culture beat it up, when the nuclear family was still alive and kicking despite the impending extinction of the extended family. The new information gives a much stronger explanation for the phenomena: Young Czechs live with their parents until their mid-20s or later, basically until they marry (though this is also explained by the shortage of housing and high rents). Children tend to settle in the same town as their parents, allowing the social network of extended family to flourish. Above and beyond anecdotal evidence such as this, however, is the undeniable fact that, for Czechs, relationships among family members are close, and remain so for a lifetime.

These things are changing slowly now that the society is open. New generations that have very little memory of that time are growing up. One of C.'s students, when asked how she would define her generation, said, "We are the first generation that was not affected by communism." They remember it, but a 20-year-old, for instance, was five when the revolution took place. Some of our older students may have been 10 or 15 in 1989. In fact, as Mike pointed out, younger people are more likely than older ones to talk about life under communism precisely because they have some memories of it, but they were too young to be compromised. No one who was compromised will give details.

It will take generations (two, maybe three?) to purge the effects of communism from the psyche of the land. Many in the generation that were young adults in 1989 put on suits, started businesses, and began comparison shopping. Many older people did as well. But changing your economic outlook is a superficial change. We notice when walking around our neighborhood that everyone's curtains are religiously drawn tightly closed at night. It would be anathema for a stranger on the street to be able to see into your house. Tight-lipped people waiting at bus stops rarely make small talk, except in the smallest of villages. There are more examples, but I hope that suffices to illustrate the pattern. On the other hand, children growing up now are increasingly influenced by the west. Left and right, kids in baggy jeans, tee-shirts, hair gel, and bling listen to Eminem at top volume on their walkmans. But these children are still being raised by parents who grew up in a culture of profound mistrust and you can see, despite the outward appearance of Western pop culture, the social norms that differentiate the people in one's close network of friends and family from the anonymous mass of suspicious strangers are still very strong.

So an experimental recasting of the society as a whole has had disastrous side-effects on the psychologies of individuals and the relationships between them. This fact is curious because, from one point of view, a society consists primarily of the web of individual relationships that compose it. A national government--even a regional or municipal one--seems largely to be an arbitrary structure imposed over the organic, self-generating entity underneath. Whether you look at it in terms of Rousseau's social contract, or through Hobbes' eyes, people come together and erect the government that represents them. The difference between the two, in my mind (not having read either one in a couple of years and my memory being notoriously myopic) is the source from which the government is understood to derive its power.

Hobbes gave primary authority to the government, since government is the only means by which order emerges from chaos, the only conceivable tamer of the savage brutes worldwide who constantly war among themselves for precious resources. Government, in his view, bestows certain rights upon the individuals in proportion to its magnanimity. The rights, however, lie first with the government and are doled out to the people on an as-needed basis. Rousseau, on the other hand, gave primary authority to the people who, through the rational principle, sign away certain of their rights in the name of the protections of an orderly society. That's the social contract we all remember from high school social studies.

But wherever you stand in the political philosophy debate, the government does not create the society. Humans being gregarious creatures by nature, the society exists primarily due to the coexistence of individuals. For a harebrained example, think back to summer camp, or imagine how it might have been if you, like me, never got to go. All the kids show up from their various hometowns, and within a few days various orderly networks have emerged: social hierarchies; networks of friends; pairs, triangles, and other elaborate geometries in the pursuit of love and/or lust, and all this despite the best efforts of the camp counselors to stamp their own vision of order onto the whole thing.

Of course, the communist government had a lot more power than camp counselors do, and was able through its policies to sculpt the society in thorough and far-reaching ways. That, in effect, was the noble goal that started the whole thing going back in 1917--social engineering, creating the perfect society out of the raw material of individuals and the forces that bind them together. My question lies in where the transition from noble social engineering to totalitarianism happens. C. has made the point, in a couple of our discussions about the matter, that no government sets out to be evil (certain despots excepted). Governments, ever since our clever little constitution made it hip to create governments with a moral agenda, set out in some document or another the moral structure by which they promise to operate and the moral goals they aim to achieve. Under communism, it was the eradication of the class struggle, the elimination of the established bourgeois aristocracy. It was to reunite the workers with the fruits of their labor. Certainly, there is nothing ignoble or evil in those goals. Thick-headed, perhaps, but not evil.

Lest one think that the rhetoric about the glorious struggle of the proletariat to throw off the shackles of class society was simply a convenient rhetorical shroud for totalitarianism, listen to this:

Last night over beers, Mike's Czech girlfriend, a lawyer who is about to begin a new job in Brussels as the "National Expert" (her real title) to liaise between the Czech Republic and the EU concerning issues of food safety legislation, explained how the communist government made judges. A worker was chosen somehow from the ranks, given a three-month training, and then (poof!) he was a judge. The workers judged the workers. This was possible, Monika said, because Czech law under communism was not a common law system with all those pesky "precedents" and such that muddle the American system and make it impossible for non-lawyers to understand. Instead, it was a system of codal law: everything was written down and quite explicitly delineated. To find the punishment for someone who stole $350 worth of livestock from his neighbor, simply flip to the appropriate page of the legal code, and there it was for all to see. A perfectly fair and just system, right? In theory, is a worker judging workers that different from, say, twelve peers judging a peer? The numbers differ, but the goals are not wholly incommensurate.

More on this topic, and its relation to "social capital" in the US later.

A few months ago, C. and I discovered in downtown Brno a delicious Indian restaurant called Taj (which here is pronounced like ‘Thai’). After giving up on both of Brno’s Mexican restaurants, because of inauthenticity in one case and ridiculously-priced inauthenticity in the other, we needed to find somewhere to go for special occasions. Taj is just that: You can get a beautiful spicy meal there, but a dinner for two’ll cost you 600 crowns (about $30, which is two-and-a-half days’ pay). Thus we leave it for very special occasions, like our third anniversary, which we celebrated in April. Recently, however, we have discovered that Taj has an excellent and affordable lunch special, so we head over there once a week to see what's on offer.

Today we decided to have lunch there, and we walked past St. James Cathedral on our way from the tram to the restaurant. We finally saw with our own eyes the archaeological dig we’ve been hearing about. Apparently, while tearing up the street next to the church to perform some sewer maintenance or some such, city workers stumbled upon an old cemetery from the middle ages. It makes perfect sense, because every other church is surrounded by its own proprietary cemetery, but St. James is surrounded on four sides by city streets. So the real question is, at what point did the city forget about the existence of the cemetery and just pave over it? In any event, regardless of who forgot what when, there have been human bones resting just under the pavement in the middle of Brno for a couple of hundred years, and a bunch of folks are now busy excavating them. Today, the green-overalls city worker guys were sharing their turf with a bunch of student archaeologists, who were gently dusting off the just-exposed skeletons, some with crushed skulls, some fully intact and still in the reverent burial pose. I'm not sure I'd ever seen real human bones before coming to Europe, but I know I've seen a lot of them since. We have the Capuchin Monastery crypts, the bone church in Kutna Hora, the holy relics built into the cathedral in Olomouc, and so on.

I mentioned the green overalls guys because they entertain me so much. Not the guys in particular, because really they're not very entertaining at all, but their colored overalls are. From what I can tell, this is just a European thing. Different trades wear different characteristic colors, though it could very well be that different city departments wear different characteristic colors. In the Czech Republic, there are a couple of shades: green, navy blue, red, maybe some others. I remember the German overalls palette, though, with much respect. Not only did they choose vibrant colors to liven up their workaday jobs (collectors of the recycled glass in fuchsia overalls, rakers of the leaves in sea green, baggers of the leaves in emerald green, sweepers of the streets in orange, and so on around the color wheel), but they wore them with such pride. "I am a member of the orange team," you could practically hear the man thinking to himself as he scrupulously arranged the piles of dirt at the curb for another orange-overalled man to pick up. "We possess skills and efficiency that men in other-colored overalls will never understand."

I'm trying really hard to tie these themes together, but I give up. It's going to have to go like this: Death does not wear vibrant colors. Death wears saltpeter slacks (chimneysweep chinos?). There's something very humbling about seeing all these skeletons, the remains of people who died hundreds of years ago, whose great-grand-children died just slightly less than hundreds of years ago. It's not just that these people receded over time from the memories of their descendents, as almost everyone does within a generation or two. Even though digital photography and modern data storage technology allow us to archive every detail of our lives as they happen, the great-grand-somethings who we will never meet will eventually forget that we ever existed. Eventually, everyone in the city of Brno forgot that the people who had once been worn by those bones had ever lived at all, and they simply paved them over. Above the skeletons of the monks in one room of the Capuchin Crypt, plaques read, "What you are, we were. What we are, you will be." It was meant, perhaps, to be a cryptic rallying call for the afterlife, but it points more directly to the perseverence of dust.

This makes some sense of the tombstone habit, wherein we engrave our names and appropriate dates for all to see, anchor ourselves to a given time and place ("Hey, that guy was alive during the Civil War!"), for the sake of not being wholly forgotten, at least until the wind and the stone come to an agreement about who can last longer. It's strange to realize that my parents, for instance, exist now only as memories of my first-hand experience. When I am gone, they will exist as stories that I have told about my memories, and then they will become stories of stories that my grandson thinks he remembers hearing from his grandpa when he was a kid, though he might have seen it on TV, he can't quite remember. This is how we disappear.

Last night I attended a performance of what I had been told would be a ballet interpretation of Pink Floyd's The Wall. I had no idea what that meant, but our friend Anne had bought us tickets, so we signed on. We took the tram straight from work, so I was wearing jeans and a flannel and C. was in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. When we got off the tram at the stop given in the directions, we realized that we were at Brno's main opera and ballet hall. We walked inside to find the Brnese arrayed in their finest evening wear: ankle-length satin gowns, black suits with black turtlenecks, high heels, hair spray. On a Monday night in Brno, this was the place to be. Suddenly it occurred to me. . . evening wear, opera hall. . . that I might soon be watching an orchestral "interpretation" of The Wall, or even worse.

Although it seems impossible, this sounded worse than anything having to do with synchronized fireworks or the London Philharmonic (who I believe took care of Dark Side of the Moon sometime in the '80s). It conjured up images of the night four years ago I saw Brian Wilson perform the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds, live, uncut, and in order. The curtain rose on a full symphony, who busted into an orchestral arrangement of Beach Boys medleys, touching the highlights of all the surf classics. Nearly an hour into the ordeal, we were all wondering if this was what we had paid the $35 for. But no, an MC came out and spoke to us, explaining that Brian was having some doubts about coming out onto the stage, that he was feeling a little vulnerable, and that we needed to be patient for a few minutes and give him a really warm welcome when he finally came out. This we did, and it was gorgeous. While Pet Sounds is not my favorite Beach Boys album (the incomplete and never released Smile takes that prize), I could consider it nothing less than an honor to see the aging Brian Wilson live on stage crooning through a 30-year old album which had made rock history by using Beach Boys surf harmonies as a medium to convey the passionate and intricately structured longings of a neurotic.

Thankfully, we saw no orchestra pit in the theater, and when the curtain went up on the Pink Floyd performance, I heard the opening sounds of the album itself. I used to listen to that album almost every day when I was in junior high, to the point where one of my siblings once sat me down and interrogated me about why it interested me so. I don't even think I was aware of all the angst back then, although I do remember that something in "Comfortably Numb" resonated with me when I was 11. Whenever I would get to the part in the song when Roger Waters sings

When I was a child
I caught a fleeing glimpse
out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
The child is grown, the dream is gone

a little teary-eyed nostalgia would wash over me, and I'd unpack the sepia-toned memories of my own childhood and wonder how much of my humanity I'd sacrificed since leaving the single-digit birthdays.

I haven't really listened to The Wall very much since then. I put it on the back shelf once I became old enough to understand the album as Roger Waters' overblown and somewhat calculated thirtysomething angst and ego parade. As a result, hearing the album again activated vivid and distinct memories of the house where we lived when I was 11, the endless summer days of Legos and D&D, the awful green carpet in my room.

So the set was a po-mo Picassoesque-geometried Parthenon kind of deal, all in white. There were some pretty cool colored-spotlight effects, and some interesting uses of backlit people behind very stretchy semi-translucent gauze to create a larval/purgatory effect. The dancing was amazing, especially that of the guy referred to only as "Him" in the program, by which is meant, you know, a little bit of Syd Barrett, a little bit of Roger Waters, a little bit of Everyman (you know, the guy who was played by Bob Geldoff in the film). I was really impressed by all the choreography at the beginning. At one point, Him (dressed in sanitorium white) and the woman playing his mom, in a long crimson tango dress, were up at the front of the stage doing one of those fighting-yet-embracing push-me-pull-you dances, and another couple--tiny in comparison, sillhouetted at the far back of the stage by a huge turquoise screen--was doing the exact same dance in parallel, but with the dancers' genders switched. It wasn't perfect, though. The characters were maybe a little too cookie-cuttered from the film. From time to time, it seemed that someone had taken notes from the Ron Howard school of directing, and the dancing pantomimed a bit too literally the content of the lyrics (for instance, during "Another Brick in the Wall Part I," when the dancers lay on top of one another in a little wriggling pyramid, as if they were, oh I get it, bricks). Despite the little ache in my side that reminded me I was sitting through a modern ballet set to a prog-rock anthem, the thing was interesting, well-executed overall, and it kept me watching.

By the second half, though, after the ponderous Another Brick in the Wall theme had taken over, all the dancers were dressed in nothing but underwear and hospital gowns, and Him had started cycling a second time through his series of desperate and frightened expressions, it had worn a little thin. The dancing had gone from the stark and elegant two- and three-figure interactions to ghastly white lunatics in hospital gowns marching zombie-like in huge circles in 4/4-time to "Run like Hell." When the patients all brought out giant white pillows and started throwing them at Him, it was time for the album to end. What is it with pillow fights? Why did Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and Sam have to have that slo-mo tears-of-joy-filled pillow fight in Rivendell? We half-expected Gimli to jump in, armor and all.

In the middle of March, having been in the Czech Republic for nine months, I was invited to participate in a traditional springtime procession in a tiny village in southern Moravia. A straw man was to be carried from the village square down to the river, set on fire, and then tossed into the water; green branches would be gathered, decorated with ribbons, and returned to the square. All of this was in the name of dismissing winter and welcoming the return of spring. When we arrived in the middle of the cold gray afternoon, we joined a small group of parents and children and began marching to the river, singing Czech folk songs all the while. But I was misled about this being a traditional procession: At some point it was admitted that Czechs haven’t enacted this ceremony for a hundred years or more. I was part of a re-creation, an attempt to resurrect an old tradition that had died out generations ago. I discovered later that the group of people marching down to the river were Waldorf school moms and dads, and that this was a Waldorf event. Waldorf schools were imported from the West in 1995 or so.

I was tremendously disappointed, but I couldn’t quite say why. Was it just the tourist in me, disappointed by the lack of quaint costumes? I recalled a wine festival I had stumbled upon the previous autumn in the village where I live, when the participants had been dressed in the traditional Moravian lace-and-embroidery-embellished garb. They started performing traditional songs and dances, parading through the streets of the village joined by a small marching band and a group of men pulling a red wagon that held a big decanter of burčak, an enticingly sweet midpoint on the journey from grape juice to wine. They poured glasses for the folks watching along the sidewalk or from their lace-curtained windows. I noticed that I was the only foreigner there, in fact, probably the only person not from the village itself, and this produced a wonderful feeling of satisfaction at the authenticity of it all.

So why the disappointment at those real Czech folks marching down to the river, trying to resurrect some bit of their heritage, even if many could not remember all the words to the songs? The urge to resurrect old traditions is here, as everywhere, a reaction to the ever-accelerating pace of life and the fear that one’s own way of life is being consumed by the global behemoth of instant glitz, pop culture, and convenience. In a country that just 15 years ago was dominated by secret police, closed borders, and banana lines, things are changing quickly and people are in a hurry to make up for lost time.

My disappointment, it turns out, was at being confronted with my own naivety. I had moved to the Czech Republic in hopes that I could learn something from a people who had had no choice for so long but to define themselves by other means than what they could afford to buy. Instead I found many of them eager to acquire as many as possible of the vices of the West. The march down to the river was a response to that, an unglamorous act of real people trying to do something real for themselves, trying to create meaning where meaning is in danger of slipping away.

On my cynical days, the growing Czech hunger for the consumer lifestyle suggests that human nature longs for little more than cool stuff to buy; real and meaningful traditions seem only to survive as long as people are prohibited, whether by circumstance or design, from having enough shopping opportunities.

On other days, however, I catch glimpses of an entire nation rallying to redefine itself after centuries of being ripped apart and re-sewn by the hands of various would-be empire builders. They are hard at work rebuilding their social institutions and public infrastructure, trying to purge the last whiff of totalitarianism from their souls. In effect, they are redesigning their society from the bottom up, and a necessary part of that is to resurrect old traditions. How else to remember who they were? The enthusiasm and success of their effort suggests far more convincingly that the fabric of human nature is truly resilient and durable stuff.