I’m making an effort to finish off the plethora of non-fiction books I’ve marked as ‘currently reading’ at Goodreads. My life is full of these books: in the sitting room, my library, the family room, the bedroom, the car, the handbag. The idea is to avoid the sense of panic at having nothing to read during an idle moment, but because I flit from one to another, it can take a long time for me to finish them…

I bought Griffith Review #69, The European Exchange because I miss being a member of the European community. (Yes, I’m an Aussie, but although I’ve never used it, a British passport was worth having before Brexit. Now it’s just a curiosity for the scrapbook.)

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Mat Schulz has captured in ‘The tyranny of closeness’ exactly how so many of us feel. We lived in a world connected by cheap flights not Facebook and Zoom, and that mobility made us citizens of the world. Yes, there was a price to be paid in carbon footprints, and Australians have to reckon with ‘flight shame’ which propels Europeans to travel by train rather than by air, but still, we feel compelled to travel, marooned as we are at the edge of the world.

Flight shame comes with far deeper ramifications for Australians than for Europeans. Travel from Australia to any other country involves an enormous carbon footprint. If we submit fully to guilt, Europe once again becomes a distant land in physical terms. If, soon enough, Australians rarely fly any more, rarely visit the rest of the world, then the tyranny of closeness will come to mean something else — evoking a constant network of virtual togetherness that will never be truly satisfying. (p.35)

As Schulz says, Europeans who live so close to each other, never feel the same jolt when arriving after a long-haul flight. (I vividly remember my first arrival, in Vienna. Stupid with jetlag, I was so disorientated that I thought I was hallucinating and would wake up soon and be back in Australia).

Schulz is conscious not only of his own travel miles, but of those he’s caused as an artistic director of a music festival, bringing literally thousands of people into Krakow to attend it. If the solution to the carbon problem is to make this festival local, then Australian musicians would be excluded. (We have been excluded from hearing the world’s best opera stars for years and years. They’re happy for us to buy their recordings, but they won’t make the long haul flight here to perform.) The cancelled flights of C-19 are teaching us what our future might be like…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/12/16/griffith-review-69-the-european-exchange-edi... ( )