It was one of those charmed evenings when everyone's engaged, everyone's interested in everyone else, conversation never lags ... and the time just flies! Conversation covers everything except people's work, and has no need of recharge by cheap politics or gossip. Everyone's actually learning stuff, not that it feels like learning - it feels like a Symposium, one of the dinner parties Kant characterized as the "highest moral-physical good" at the end of his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. It helps when your friend V has, against orders, cooked up a storm, indeed outdone herself cooking an Indian feast, and you've added insult to injury by producing cheeses from the Queen Victoria Market. These include an époisse you portentously introduce as "the ultimate test of friendship" (it is true that the woman in the French cheese stall recommended getting something less demanding for the uninitiated!) but everyone just dives in.How lucky I am, you are thinking, to have met such lovely people - and then one asks: well Mark, how will your thinking be different for having spent this year here? You bide for time, you start "among the ways..." and trail off, and then surprise yourself by producing a list which swells through subheads to include four big things:
(i) a newly ecological way of understanding the relationship of humanity and nature, no longer based on a contrast between culture and "wilderness," learned from (textual and imagined) Aboriginal Australians;
(ii) a new and different understanding of the adventures in the Americas, made possible by acquaintance with a different "new world" colonized by some of the same people if not at exactly the same time, how strange and precarious the hold of European peoples on distant continents, already inhabited;
(iii) an understanding that the European empires - notably the British - continued to be important for far longer than your American-centric education told you, and
(iv) awareness that the Asian future - China and India - is here already.
The best thing, of course, is that none of these is something you'd have thought you needed to learn a year ago. None of them is what you came to Australia for, and yet - lucky you - you learned them anyway! Nothing beats travel, huh, unless it be spending enough time in a place that you can make really good friends.
Tomorrow (Monday) it's adieu Mebourne, and Wednesday morning, my end-of-independence day, it's farewell Australia. But I'll be back!
