How Long the Lonely Road

Holy man and holy priest, This love of life makes me weak at my knees, And when we get there make your play, ’Cos soon I feel you’re gonna carry us away. In a promised lie you made us believe. For many men there is so much grief, And my mind is proud, but it aches with rage, And if I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die. —The Kinks Of the British in Arabia , T. E. Lawrence saw two types: “Class one; subtle and insinuating, caught the characteristics of the people about him, their speech, their conventions of thought, almost their manner. . . . In such a frictionless habit of influence his own nature lay hid, unnoticed.” “Class two,” he continues, “the John Bull of the books, became more rampantly English the longer he was away from England. He invented an Old Country for himself, a home of all remembered virtues, so splendid in the distance that , on return, he often found reality a sad falling off and withdrew his muddled self into fractious advocacy of the good old times. Abroad, through...

So where are you going to? I don’t mind. If I live too long I’m afraid I’ll die. So I will follow you wherever you go, If your offered hand is still open to me. Strangers on this road we are on, We are not two, we are one. —The Kinks The Greeks insist on calling their northern neighbor the Former Yugoslavia Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom, coveting the geographic name of their own province, the birthplace of Alexander the Great and a Byzantine fatherland.1 So jealous are they that they barred the Fyromites from entering NATO or the European Union, and from using the old sixteen-pointed star of the Argead Royal House on their national flag, which instead flies an Oriental sun with eight rays. To the east, the Bulgarians call the people here Bulgarians with accents; to the north, Serbia refers to this hilly land as Southern Serbia and refuses to recognize her Orthodox church; but the Macedonians, a poor but proud lot, erect statues of Alexander and refer to their country by the heroic...