Oybama
By Uri Avnery
(source: Uri Avnery’s Column)
This week I enjoyed an hour of happiness.
I was on my way home, after collecting William Polk’s new book about Iran. I admire the wisdom of this former State Department official.
I was walking on the seaside promenade, when I was seized by a desire to go down to the seashore. I sat down on a chair on the sand, sipped a coffee and smoked an Arab water-pipe, the only smoke I allow myself from time to time. A ray of the mild winter sun painted a golden path on the water, and a lone surfer rode on the white foam of the waves.
The shore was almost deserted. A stranger waved at me from afar. Some passing youngsters from abroad asked to try my pipe. From time to time my gaze wandered to far-away Jaffa jutting out into the sea, a beautiful sight.
FOR A moment I was in a world that was all good, far from the depressing items that were prominent in the morning paper. And then I remembered that I had felt the same way many-many years ago.
It was 68 years ago, in exactly the same spot. It was also a pleasant winter day, facing a stormy sea. I was on sick leave, after a severe attack of typhoid fever. I was sitting on a deck chair, warming myself under the gentle winter sun. I felt my strength coming back to me after the debilitating disease, I forgot the far-away World War. I was 18 years old and the world was perfect.
I remember the book I was reading: Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West”, a forbidding tome that painted an entirely new picture of world history. Instead of the then accepted landscape in which a straight line of progress led from ancient times to the Middle Ages, and from there to the modern era, Spengler painted a landscape of mountain chains, in which one civilization follows another, each one being born, growing up, getting old and dying, much like a human being.