There is perhaps nothing more bracing than going to a place that is familiar to you in a bookish sense only.
For one, you'll have to make sense of it as a new place other than the one that occupies your imagination. There is some trepidation here: what if it doesn't measure up? The imagination often trafficks in the ideal and doesn't like things to be mucked up with a sudden and inconvenient breath of reality. However, I don't remember being disappointed in my first glimpse of New York City - or New Orleans.
The lure of the mythic city stepped aside just a little as the real place flooded in. I found that both realities, if you will, could be accomodated.

In middle age, however, the imagination may exert an even more powerful grip than that of the senses.
Direct experience appears increasingly mundane, a matter of rote and repitition - so many ruts to get in and out of, so much bleak, but strangely familiar, territory to get through before day is done. I worry a little bit that my somewhat dulled appetites will be easily satisfied. David Sedaris said he went to the movies as the City of Light beckoned all the young and impressionable around him. Hemingway sat in bars and restaurants getting tanked while Tout Paris teemed with seductive energies. As Atget stalked his targets in the grey light of dawn, a thousand bohemians slept.
Monet's sun-drenched gardens passed into the night unseen; Pisarro's outstretched boulevards. . .well, you get the picture. To be jaded is to stay inside.

I doubt if Vienna will fail to move me, however. A friend just wrote me to tell me it was "weird". I'm so glad he said that. From what I've been reading, it has seemed the opposite: a well-ordered place that appears to rely on the outmoded etiquettes and elaborate courtesies of the past - even if that past may offer more than just a bit of good, practical human sense. If a place is "weird", it means that there are possible aberrations and displacements that might put a crack in these well-weathered things. If a place is "weird", it has possibilities the well-ordered person might shun; the inveterate law-abider will want to crush; the householder and citizen can't abide. Weird is very good. I'm holding onto that weirdness and will look for it always.

And come to think of it, it was the city's "weirdness"
that drove "The Third Man" even as it made Joseph Cotten a very tired fellow. Amidst the city's grave and monstrous presence, bureaucracies wove tiny, but inextricable webs; people said little - and kept to the shadows whenever possible. Relationships ran afoul of a black market that swooped down and corrupted everything and everybody. Secrets were bought and sold - just as people were. It wasn't merely Postwar Angst that had gripped the place; it was fear. People were afraid.

Of course, the worst had already happened. The Jews were gone: deported, killed, or "made" to disappear.
Firebombings had wiped out baroque cities that have been paintstakingly, after the German fashion, reconstructed in places and louvered into the Twentieth Century by means of apartment blocks so anti-old world that almost any alienated person anywhere would be comfortable in them. Vienna's coffee-house scene was not the same, alas, having lost its pre-eminence as THE milieu in which to while away the time irresponsibly. The world could no longer be irresponsible. A war had come. And nothing COULD be the same.

Another friend of mine said he used to see, in the Sixties, remnants of the Hapsburg era, when older gentlemen sat around telling lies about the great pre-Sarajevo days. As they sat their stroking their long moustaches, they could see all the trappings of a great imperial city strutting about them, and were well-satisifed. They could lament the untimely end of Franz Joseph with creditable sincerity and not seem sentimental. The shot mad Gavrilo Princeps fired did represent an abrupt end to their era - though, as cultivated Viennese, they hardly had the worst of it.
They should have talked to a Frenchman - if they could have found one. French and English manhood was at a premium after WWI; it had choked on gas, been slaughtered nineteen to the dozen in No Man's Land, or given up the ghost in a field hospital behind the trenches.

The memories of old gentlemen are, however, necessarily long, having been short-circuited by so many other catatrophes, like the inconceivably brutal interval of the second great war, in which their well-ordered lives suffered another wallop. Yet the imagination graps after such fellows in an agreeable way. I wish they were still there taking their coffee and licorice.

Gunter Grass was asked to state the single greatest German weakness. He said: obedience. I wonder how obedient the Viennese were, when Hitler started expanding his might and territory; when Sudetenlanders strewed city squares with flowers as the Nazi brass rolled in; as Kristillnacht shattered the sinister stillness of so many dark nights. I suppose I am as fascinated by these questions as any - though I doubt if I will ask any of them outright. When you come to a place - no matter what its history - you should be respectful.

It's not as if my own adopted city lacks history of a somewhat similar sort. The Shaw area went up in flames during the riots that broke out all over the country in the late Sixties. On nearby H Street, are whole blocks are just now being filled in, having achieved a rosy ripeness for developers who see the area as, at long last, desirable. There may well be people here in my neighborhood who started the fires, driving good businesses forever out of the area - or just sat mutely watching. One day, as I was painting, a guy came up to me and said he had a girlfriend who lived in the building right behind me - a yawning vacancy now. Thought they'd get married, said he.
Thought everything was gonna stay just as it was.
Thought. . .but it was not meant to be. He didn't say what he did during the riots. Nobody else I've talked to has either. When some sort of explosive community event occurs, it seems that guilt is passed around in very small dollops. Each person digests just a little bit of it and takes no more than he can stand. I've always thought that the torching of our own cities was not only insanely impuslive, but self-destructive in a way I'm at a loss to even understand. Perhaps that is the lot of all impulsive acts that start off as one independent show of defiance or principle and gather force as others pile on their grievances and outrages; the exponential increase of the violence, the reach of the fires, ultimately astonish everyone, having had a sort of private genesis: as a rock thrown or a passion gone out of control. How can any one man take responsibility? Impossible - though it seems that, to live, we are all responsible for every goddamned
thing.

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. The stunned silence and national numbness was put back into circulation and everybody was, once again, reminded of how much the world has changed - for us in the US at any rate. Old Europe is used to being invaded. Only happened here for a very short period of time during the colonial uprising, otherwise known as the Revolutionary War; and during the War of 1812 - a sort of carryover from the earlier conflict. But Europe is a well-trampled and exhaustively looted place where every possible engine of war has been tried and exploited; countless populations decimated or held hostage; arrogant monarchs, having given themselves carte blanche, ranged as far as their ambitions would take them - people and places, of course, be damned. That sort of thing is relatively new to us here and we really can't handle it. 9/11 was a sort of a test-case as to how a large and vocal population can begin to sort out its own sudden, and possibly increasing, vulnerability. We're not very good at it yet; we just haven't had the practice.
Europeans are about as good as you can get at such a thing, having had plagues and wars in their midst for centuries. I would imagine that the average person in Nineteenth Century Europe was just glad to be alive.
At the same time in the United States, "we" were pushing our boundaries past the old "aborigines" to the shining Pacific, slaughtering men and beasts along the way, of course; labeling new things as we found them; and crowing with delight at each new territorial conquest. We weren't just glad to be alive - we couldn't wait for the next day to start! Europe was already quite ancient - and even slightly ridiculous - to us. Mark Twain went over there and made fun of it, as fussy Henry James stayed in its drawing rooms observing good manners (and the messy motivations behind them.) Proust was writing decadent stuff about sense memory while people in this country were sniffing at the prairie grass for the first time and wanting to put a plough to it.

Horrific as it was, 9/11 was a sort of wake-up call, not for us to get off our butts and nail terrorists to the wall of our righteous indignation, but in an historical sense. It said: why not us? We have good things (the labor we get for virtually nothing; the incredible natural wealth that's been ours for the taking; our system of laws that often do protect the innocent), but we are not perceived as "good" by everyone; nor is the good we have guaranteed forever, or without certain built-in inequalities. Those who have didn't get "it" by doing the laundry. For the self-made man or woman to even exist, countless armies of "helpers" must put shoulder to the wheel (as their collective backs are very often against the wall.) We talk talk so much about the machinery of our success as its glittering potency, its astonishing reach.
Part of the outside world doesn't like us. It has nurtured a sense of envy, disbelief and outrage at the great gangling colossus of our labor force, our inconceivable wealth, and our exemplary, but self-absorbed, democracy. For us to believe that we are well-liked because we like ourselves is to have a dangerously infinite capacity for self-delusion.
People is diff'runt, as much separated by culture and economic circumstances as they are united by common beliefs and prejudices and economic strivings.

In a word or two: we can be innocent no longer.

And, in this, Europe is an excellent model. It lost its innocence in about 1077 and has kept on losing it.
It's safe to say that all of its innocence has been used up. And a good thing too. The only thing innocence is really good for is to help define guilt.
Innocence is overrated and should be yielded happily, once its limited usefulness has had its day. We should have innocent children; indeed we should.
Children are the only humans among us who might be presumed innocent by reasonable persons. But that doesn't mean that they get a free ride either. A six-year old kid tried to stab me with a pair of scissors once. (I mean, when I was six as well.) He wouldn't have tried that on me now; I have the power to take away his video capabilities.

Indeed: why not us? I am not making the argument that we "deserve" to be attacked: merely that it is more likely to happen now than ever. It is no longer possible to be an isolated cosmos of law and custom; of permissible wealth and unpardonable ignorance; of good people and bad people and everybody else in between. What has always merely happened to "them"
has now happened to us. And we've reacted exactly like the great gangling colossus we are, and not as a responsible power trying to figure out what in hell has happened and how we might adjust to it in the future among a community of other nations.

It is germane that I'll be visiting a place that is now a center for international negotiation. The old world city - mostly famous for its pastries and Mozart
- has now found a role on the international stage. It is also germane that I will be visiting it now, so close to the anniversary of an event that surprised the hell out of nobody but us. I will ask questions about that. I'm sure every Viennese person I meet (who is willing and able to speak English) will be as eager to chime in on that question as anybody else on earth. Because everybody HAS to have an opinion.
We're all close now and that's one thing that's not likely to change.