About The Book

“We may see what we call the sun, but we have lost Helios forever!”

As he lay dying, D.H. Lawrence wrote this in his final book, Apocalypse. He grieved that civilized, ‘enlightened’ humanity had lost its connection to the living cosmos. 

Coming of age in the privileged world of secular intellectuals, I found my life, with its wonderful books and music, too comfortable—padded, bland— and yearned for the link to a more vital universe. Yes, I loved playing music, especially with chamber ensembles, or fully becoming a character in one of our high school plays. But I longed for more and discovered it when I first experienced Balkan dance as a teenager. Somehow, those snaky rhythms caught me, obliterated consciousness, fused mind and body, so that I, so cerebral, could lose myself in the movements that accompanied them. I became one with the earth, the sky, the others in the open circle that imaged inclusion and community. As a friend once said, “Dancing is my church.” For me, fully immersed in intellectual pursuits, interpreting the glories of classical music or the subtleties of canonical literary texts, dance provided a portal to a pulsing universe. 

Then dance and music led me to the Balkans. In Belgrade I rested atop the stones of Kalemegdan, steeped in centuries of history, and watched the Sava and the Danube meet below. Beneath a hot sun near the dusty Trojan ruins, a kindly Turkish farmer gave me ayran, a yogurt drink, chilled in his backyard fountain. On Rhodes, a whole village made me a feast when I arrived on the back of the scooter belonging to one of its residents. To this day, the smell of ouzo conjures robust celebrants in Greek cafes. I found these vital people, living within an ongoing history of strife, heroic in an age that Kierkegaard said could birth no heroes. Hence, my chapter, “A Hero of Our Time.” I revisited the Balkans, studied them, read their books, and kept dancing. 

Pianist, scholar, professor, I have always loved teaching works that opened minds, writing critiques that pointed out how they do that, playing cathartic music. But eventually I realized that this was mediation— between author and student, scholar and text, composer and audience. Missing was my own voice, my direct connection to something— experience? imagination? cosmos? — that could replicate what I felt through dance. 

To me, fiction has always seemed as real as fact. I count literary characters among the people I know best in this world—Raskolnikov, Prince Myshkin, Stavrogin, Emma Bovary, Lady Chatterley— and how often I’ve wanted to warn them, “Don’t,” so gripping have I found their quandaries. To touch life, to create it through words, to shape experience— I yearned for that. This became the genesis of Anna, a character I came to know well, and her novel, set in a place I love, among people I care for, its theme close to me.