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Afterword
- University of South Carolina Press
- Chapter
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Afterword The course of a person’s days, to draw from John Addington Symonds, depends less upon intellect and planning than upon “sentiment , emotion, involuntary habits of feeling and observing, constitutional sympathy with the world and men,” and “tendencies of curiosity and liking.” Despite my intention, I didn’t stop jogging after the Caledonian. With the end of my stay rushing into sight, I became more active. I sped up, not because I wanted to hurry across a finish line, but because I wanted to slow days down. To stretch hours I filled them with doings. The day after the race I ate lunch with Faith Pullin, a retired member of the English department. We ate in Home Bistro on West Nicolson. We sipped champagne and told stories about academic doings. Once Faith became so exasperated that early one morning she flew to Morocco. That evening she flew back to Edinburgh. The next day she met classes as usual. Two days after eating with Faith, I had lunch with Steve Neff. Steve was my closest friend in Edinburgh. Forty years ago, when Steve was fifteen and a sophomore in high school and I was twenty-four and just back from Cambridge, he was in an English class I taught at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. He was stunningly bright and nice. We kept track of each other through the years, occasionally sending Christmas cards or books, and once or twice meeting by happenstance in London. After high school, Steve marched through Harvard, law school at the University of Virginia, the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and a fellowship at Christ College at Cambridge. Twenty-two years ago he joined the faculty of law in Edinburgh, over the years writing a shelf of articles and books, 186 Edinburgh Days the most recent being “a general history,” War and the Law of Nations, published by Cambridge University Press. At the end of my stay he was checking footnotes in a book for Harvard entitled Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the American Civil War, the only history of the Civil War, he said, that didn’t mention Shiloh or Gettysburg. We ate at the Grain Store on Victoria Street, my second visit. I returned because I liked the food and the place. Ceilings were smoky and arched, and the rooms had once been shops and cavernous bins. Thick pillars ran through the restaurant, rising from the floor below and supporting St. Columba’s Free Church above on Johnson Terrace. The church was stony and heavy, although since St. Columba’s advertised itself as “Presbyterian, Evangelical and Reformed,” its theology may have been light, ponderous only in uplift. Steve and I ate pigeons and shared a bottle of merlot. Instead of billing me £34.50 as he should have, the owner charged me £27, not something I noticed until after I left. I ought to have retraced my steps to Victoria and paid the extra £7.50. Alas, I did not, the wine blowing me about wantonly, direction forgotten , both moral and geographical. While Steve hustled back to the law school, I roamed streets above Grassmarket. Purpose can blind. In contrast, the ambler often stumbles upon things that intrigue him. I discovered Steve was a gourmand. Taped to the window of Sardi’s, an Italian restaurant on Forrest, was a culinary review written by Alexander McCall Smith. Steve had accompanied Smith to Sardi’s, where he started his meal with smoked salmon parcels priced at £6.50. Next he ate a fillet steak priced at £14.95, after which he said, “That was really good.” “Dr. Neff,” Smith wrote, “is very thin. He can eat whatever he likes and not put on an ounce of weight. In this area, as in others, genes reveal the fundamental unfairness of life.” In Memoirs of a Polyglot, William Gerhardie said that “unimaginative people were wont to rate” experience too highly. Gerhardie was right. In going back to Connecticut, however, I was returning to a place I knew so well that all new experiences, aside from those triggered by aging, would have to be imaginative. Consequently I spent two of my last evenings in Edinburgh at the theater cramming actual experiences, one night attending Tom McGrath’s play Laurel & Hardy at the Royal Lyceum, another Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, put on at the Traverse by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Both evenings I walked home along West...