The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, January 6, 2024

Notably: Sometimes we get a song stuck in our head, sometimes a crush, sometimes a gloom, sometimes a place. The sense of place is not among the empire of the senses–touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste. But in a way (to not say in a sense) the sense of place encompasses them all. When we’re somewhere evocative–and often when it’s as simple a place as home–all our senses are aware, though we don’t necessarily have to be in that place to have a sense of it. As the American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan thinks of it, “a culture’s most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye.” Nor a person’s. As always my tangent has almost nothing to do with my point. For weeks now I’ve had Baalbek on my mind, a place I hardly know but from a few childhood visits and one fleeting day there as an adult, though it might as well feel, on some days, like a birthplace. It’s the history, the nostalgia, the color, that strange tan paleness of granite. UNESCO’s Heritage Site summation calls it a Phoenician city: I had no idea, although as one of the world’s oldest settlements, it would have been odd had the Phoenicians, a bit bored with the sea, not made it a place of rest and carousing. But before we swoon too much over Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman and more recent ruins, maybe, as that sense of place beckons, it’s worth remembering that American places like the Grand Canyon and Death valley outstrip even Baalbeck in ancient, ruinous beauty. That the beauty was sculpted more by time than by human hands makes it, if anything, more pure, less tainted by what it took to make it what it is. William O’Dwyer, who had been mayor of New York City, for some inexplicable reason had retired to Mexico City, and there, as he remembered his old city, he said (according to Robert Caro, who quoted him in in The Power Broker): “Lovely, dirty, naughty New York… Oh, that great big New York up there! Thank God, I’ve got those memories… most of the time I can’t get New York out of my head.” So it is with places that tug at what’s left of our ventricles. 

—P.T.

 

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Baalbek, rising over the plain of the Bekaa, stands on a site previously dedicated to the Canaanite god Baal. Construction of the city bridged three centuries and the reigns of eight emperors. Best approached from the West when the late afternoon sun plays on all its magnificent colors and shapes, Baalbek bespeaks the Roman presence in the Eastern world. The cobblestone road that emperors traversed is still there, and the triumphant gate to the city stands ruined but unbowed. The orange light of approaching sunset sets ablaze the six remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter, and shadows soften the mass of what was once the largest temple in the Roman Empire. The remaining walls of the adjacent Temple of Bacchus support massive doorways crowned by heavy stone lintels of a structure larger than the Parthenon in Athens. It was here, before the Lebanese embarked on the road to self-destruction, that modern Lebanon so perfectly blended the East and West. Yearly the Festival of Baalbek offered the best of the two cultures. Umm Kalthum, the most famous Arab singer of modern times, and Lebanon’s own magnificent vocalist Fayrauz rotated performances with such international greats as Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. And on one unforgettable evening, the velvet voice of Ella Fitzgerald sent the sounds of George Gershwin shimmering off the ruins left by Lebanon’s early Western conquerors.

–From Sandra Mackey’s Lebanon: Death of a Nation (1989).

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