The enemy is so often reduced to one word. Once, it was “imperialists” and “communists,” now it’s “crusaders” and “terrorists.” Of course, with Iraq the deathly shambles that it is, with no one quite able any longer to put a finger on who it is that “we” are fighting over there – N.B.: everyone? – the enemy is, more and more in the words of our fearless leaders, simply “the enemy.”

Attempting to chase a stray lizard from the spotless white wall of our room brought me to the balcony, where I discovered the stars, a milky diaspora so bright and crisp, it was as if seeing them for the first time. As my eyes widened to sop up the darkness, more stars appeared, and the bright pinpricks of constellations receded among them. (How did the ancients discern those shapes when total nighttime darkness let them see the stars in such abundance, when the Milky Way seemed a contiguous blob that cast shadows in the night?) Then, once I was able to see the neighboring islands against the horizon, a small streak of red shot from the crater of Stromboli’s perfect cone, hung suspended over the mountainside for a moment, and slowly faded to blackness. Somewhere to the north and maybe west of there, mysterious flashes would appear, too local and yellow to be lightning. So much hiding in that blackness of darkness! I never did oust the lizard…

Knowing only bits and pieces of the language is by turns frustrating and, those rare times when things click on both ends, exhilarating. It’s very easy to see, from this unenviable place, how contact languages, creoles, and patois(es?) come about.

Today, hike up and then down Monte Fossa delle Felci. The lines of elevation are marked off in the plants growing on the slope. Scrubby bushes and  brush give way to fragrant eucalyptus, which yields to firs and other evergreens, these finally making room for birches (their bark grayish rather than white) before everything thins out into a rocky summit. I could have done this better, but my knowledge of plant life is deplorable. It’d be impressive to survey the hillside and write a sentence professing that it is dotted with ——–, ——–, and ———, but for the moment, I’d have to leave it like that, as I’ve no idea. At the same time, it’s kind of a cheap move, too. Plant names are pleasant phonetically – unusual, poetic, rarely used in everyday speech. And any such sentence rings authoritative, flashing an effortless knowledge of all in one’s path.

In the Napes train station, there’s a signboard advertising money-transfer services. It’s a four-sided rotating deal, with each panel offering transfers to a different country: Albania, Morocco, Poland, and Senegal – and showing what I guess is a typical immigrant from each. Somehow, I don’t think this kind of thing would fly in the US, though the depictions aren’t caricatureish or offensive in any obvious way. In fact, they all look fairly accurate, though the Pole could be made more stereotypically Polish if they wanted to. She’s actually the only non-”ethnic” one. She’s also the most skilled, a nurse or surgical assistant in scrubs. The others do dirtier toil.

The bartender at our hotel in Rome wanted to know where we were from. When we told him New York, he said a cousin of his had lived there for the past 12 years. I told him we lived in a neighborhood that had once been very Italian, though very long ago. “But we are not Italian,” he answered. “We are from Romania.” I told him I was originally from Poland, and he gave me a sad smile. “The world is a strange place.”

On the beach we take turns, one of us swimming while the other sits sentinel over our things. It almost seems as if guarding our valuables is our real purpose here, the swimming incidental, of little consequence.

Every last hotel, pensione, inn, and residence in Positano will claim to offer you the grandest view of that improbable city, and every last one of them will be wrong. For that vista can only be claimed on one’s back, afloat, some hundred yards offshore and gazing up–while every last house on the rocky pews above cranes its neck to get a better look at you.

I speak Polish like an emigrant, English like an American, Russian, I’ve been told, like a Ukrainian, and French, at least I hope, like something approaching a bastard Frenchman. Spanish and Italian–which I don’t really speak at all–I speak like a Pole.

Photography, that destructor of auras, eats away at reality, but we’re no longer wont to accept reality without photography. To gaze upon, say, a chain of promontories, stretching out one from behind the other into the sun-blinding sea, will not do if we cannot photograph it–and in scrambling for the camera, taking aim, framing and reframing, it goes without saying that we miss the view. There’s a point to be made about mediation here, but I don’t want to make it. I’m far more interested in the impulse, or instinct, even. Because it’s second nature to reach for the camera when confronted with the new, shocking, harrowing, delightful, sublime. It’s second nature even though someone else most likely photographed it better than us already, and no aspect of showing the photo to others actually proves that we were there. Vacation photos are a more complex ritual that I care to get into here, and one I probably like more than most people, but there are rewards to be reaped, I think, from repressing this particular urge to reproduce.