Full moon

The moon is huge, full, completely in the clear, and it's making a shining path across the lake and directly into the window east of my desk.

In the middle of the path is a sailboat, completely dark against the lighted water. If anyone tried to paint this scene, it could end up as a cheesy silhouette on a background of shiny paper, and would give viewers no idea at all of its true beauty. I just feel lucky to have seen it at all, because the sailboat has now moved out of the shining path, and I can't even see its green running light.

Winter moons are the best, because we so often don't see them as anything other than light behind a cloud layer.

No pictures. I've tried that before, and it only leads to frustration!

Albania

I've never been to Albania, and in spite of a continuing fascination with Eastern and Southeastern Europe, I'm not even sure I'd want to go.

More than any former Communist country, Albania has been "the other" - the strange, the unknown, the unknowable. In junior high school, I read a young adult book about brave partisans in what must have been 30's or 40's Albania. Even then I knew that things had changed, and that it probably wasn't a good idea to recommend the book. (In WWII, Albania was invaded by Axis countries, and Communist partisans were armed by the U.S. and Britain to resist both Italian and later German forces. After the war, things changed rapidly!)

After 1991 things changed again, and in 1992, a family friend went to Albania for a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. He wrote about the desolate state of Tirana, the capital city - decayed buildings, broken windows never repaired, wind-blown dust so all-pervasive that everyone had skin ailments of one kind or another.

What interests me about Eastern Europe is learning a little about how people survived under dictatorship. As a visitor, you learn only what residents choose to share. In Transylvania, the one part of Eastern Europe where I've spent significant time, the people I know best are ethnic Hungarians who are citizens of Romania because of 20th-century boundary upheavals. As such, they generally keep their own counsel, and, as another friend says, you learn about them gradually, like peeling away the layers of an onion.

Fortunately for the curious, there are writers. At the moment, I'm learning a little about Albania by reading novels long and short by Ismail Kadare, whose point of view is that "Dictatorship and authentic literature a incompatible. The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship." Kadare, born in 1936, now divides his time between France and Albania, and managed to survive Enver Hoxha's regime relatively unscathed, although much of his work was banned. His books first became known in Europe through the work of Jusuf Vrioni, who began translating Kadare into French while a political prisoner in Albania.

Kadare's novels range across the whole history of Albania. I've read only three so far, but there are many more. The Concert deals in part with life among the privileged in 1970's Tirana - Party members in good standing, who work in the bureaucracy or are recognized artists. But Kadare's imagination ranges far and wide - into the mind of a dying Mao Tse Tung, or a monitor listening to transmissions from the east at a post somewhere in the Arctic, or a confirmed European leftist, trying to decide whether to back the Soviets or the Chinese.

Last fall I got close to Albania - as near as Kotor, on the coast of Montenegro. Further south are the ruins of Butrint, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and I suspect the Albanian coast is as dramatic and beautiful as the rest of the Balkan peninsula.