THE WORLD REMEMBERS OTHERWISE

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There are villages at the top of mountains which have no sensible business being there. A man climbs three thousand feet, loses a mule, two buttons, and most of his religion, and discovers at the summit a village where somebody has been comfortably selling onions for eight hundred years.

Mount Etna is especially guilty of this. The mountain smokes, the earth trembles, and the people beneath it decorate their churches in such exuberant folk Baroque that you suspect they are trying to outdo the volcano. Then the Fata Morgana comes shimmering over the Strait—a city where there is no city, towers suspended in the air, Sicily manufacturing architecture out of light.

This started me thinking about towns.

There is Paris, Texas, which is a considerable distance from Paris, France, and Athens, Georgia, where they built things with columns as if a cotton field might suddenly remember the Parthenon. Then Rome, Georgia. Apparently Georgia collected the ancient world the way some people collect teaspoons.

Immigrants have always carried place-names in their luggage. New York. New Orleans. Venice, California. Birmingham in Alabama. Surrey in British Columbia. A name crosses an ocean more cheaply than a person does, and seldom gets seasick.

But names are dangerous luggage because history climbs inside them.

Take Birmingham. A fellow may admire the old English name without importing everything England ever did. Symbols behave the same way. The Southern cross of the Stars and Bars can remind one man of ancestors and another of slavery, and both memories arrive before breakfast demanding the same chair.

Then somebody asks what Saint Andrew thought about slavery.

Poor Andrew. He was a fisherman in Roman Judea and has been dead nearly two thousand years, yet humanity keeps forwarding its arguments to his address. Later generations made him patron of countries he never visited and attached his cross to flags he never saw.

Travel far enough east and the names start playing the game backwards. There is Georgia in America and Georgia in the Caucasus, and sooner or later somebody puts “Georgia on My Mind” on the phonograph and asks what Stalin would have thought of it.

This is how geography becomes comedy.

We name the new world after the old world because nobody ever really leaves home all at once. We carry away a street name, a saint, a flag, a song, a recipe, a grievance. Then we nail them to some unfamiliar hillside and announce that we have begun again.

And perhaps we have.

But the mountain remembers otherwise.

From the village at the summit you can look down through a Fata Morgana and see a hundred Romes, Parises, Athenses, Birminghams and Georgias floating in the distance.

Every one of them original.

Every one of them borrowed.