I met a guy who shouldn't exist

The circulation of this page

in Germany is heartening, in

Poland and the Baltic nations

it is rare but very gratify-

ing. I met a guy lately whose

grandparents and great-grand-

parents were from Königsberg,

which doesn't happen to exist

anymore.

All of these cultures met in

that magically beautiful ag-

rarian strip of ground on the

Baltic Sea where the kingdom

of Prussia's medieval capital

stood welcoming watch for cen-

turies, to be obliterated as

brutally as Carthage in the

lifetime of our fathers, by

not one but several equiva-

lents of the Khmer Rouge at

Phnom Penh: the RAF, the Red

Army, the Wehrmacht, the SS,

the marauding delinquent rab-

ble of no culture but anguish.

A ghost, you would say, in 

his middle 20s: one of the

young and stateless techies

of the internet, to whom I

was introduced to advance an

interest of mine. A fellow

with a green card, an Amer-

ican girlfriend, and the full

international vocabulary of

marketing buzzwords.

We shared a plate of pasta

al fresco with a nice white

from the Rhône valley, and,

fiddling with his telephone

as they all do, he looked up

and said, You know, this is

my living, this technology;

but I feel sometimes, it will

be the death of us one day.

An opiate of the masses, I

suggested. He winced with 

recognition of the phrase;

and he said, yes, I think

it is just like that.

In this country we commun-

icate in a culture which

exulted in the fratboy

President's promise that

history was erased in 2001.

Few ever knew it, few ever

cared for it, and it was

such heaven to be relieved

of its nuisances. My in-

terlocutor's world was

erased before he was born,

and by forces more horrify-

ing than any ever mustered

on this planet against us;

but not his history, not

his culture, not his deep

awareness of the tides.

Is it preferable to appre-

ciate the limits of one's

mastery toward the end of

toil, or early enough to

let perspective burnish it?