Book Mansion was overwhelming. China’s largest bookstore occupied 172,000 square feet and carried 230,000 titles. Bestsellers included Chinese titles such as I Was an American Police Officer; I’m Only Raising You for 18 Years; Chinese-Style Divorce; and Harvard Girl, a memoir that revealed the parenting style that made her stand out from her Chinese classmates and gain acceptance to the school. That book was in its sixty-third printing.

Downstairs, Monica’s Story lay between Bill and Hillary Clinton’s autobiographies. A boxed set about Göring rubbed shoulders with What’s Behind Jewish Excellence? Translated American titles ranged from the predictable – The Da Vinci Code, The Atkins Diet—to the surprising—Henry Rollins’s Get in the Van, and a Woody Allen collection whose Chinese title promised MENSA Whores. An entire floor held English-learning materials. Love English taught pickup lines and pillow talk, including cultural hints such as “‘I’m bored’ really means ‘Do you want to have sex?’”

The students’ determination to show their best faces to the world in 2008 never waned. They were embarrassed to tell people they were unemployed or laid-off, or retired even, and so we practiced “I am a grandmother!” as a reply to inquiries about their profession.

One afternoon, a row of rickshaw bicycles pedaled through our hutong, bearing German tourists, who pointed their camera lenses at decrepit doorways.

“Why do foreigners want to take pictures of a poor neighborhood?” the class asked. “Don’t they want to go to the Forbidden City? Are they laughing at us?”

Each of the lanes framed an area the size of a football field. The rows were unlit, save for the bare sodium bulbs illuminating the scale before every shack. Recyclers bought refuse from individuals in the city, then trucked it out here after dark to sell it at a markup. Profit came from volume. Recycler Wang paid one fen ($.0013) per twelve-ounce plastic mineral-water bottle in town and received 1.5 fen ($.0020) for it here. If he bought a thousand bottles for $1.30, he could sell them for $2. The earned $.70 was the equivalent of a little over five yuan, the cost of a bowl of noodles.

In the seventeenth century, his Holiness the Pope adjudged beavers to be fish. In retrospect, that was a zoologically illogical decision; but beavers were not miffed at being changed into fish. They decided not to truckle their new specification, not to be perfect fish, textbook fish; instead they became fanciful fish, the first to have furry babies, the first to breathe air and the first fish to build for themselves commodious conical fortresses in the water.

Frogs are too pretty for anyone to seriously believe that they disdain attention, but many frogs when they sleep try to screen themselves behind leaves and rocks, to hide from people who want to poison each other with frog poison; or people who want to cremate them into frog ash, which, when worn around the neck, foils the plague; or frog-sucking people who wish to baffle themselves, or to anesthetize an aching tooth, or to forget yesterday by toxifying their heart muscles.

To get an idea of the relationship between the Earth and the Moon and the Sun, find two friends and have the self-conscious one with lots of atmosphere be the Earth and the coercive one be the Sun. And you be the Moon, if you are periodically luminous and sometimes unobservable and your inner life has petered out. Then find a large field and take three steps from the Earth, and have the Sun go a quarter mile away.

… I used to love it when it would rain in Los Angeles. I felt that the city was made suddenly reflective by the rain, that it was being coated in another, deeper layer of what it was by the falling moisture. It made me sad and that pleased me. It was a moment of relief from what I took to be the exhausting project of pretending to be happy all of the time.

As you stand near a pool of fetid water outside one of these crumbling factories you realize that the era of the Industrial Revolution (at least in this part of the world) is truly dead, never to be recovered. It is, thus, possible to visit the Rust Belt with the same mood one would visit the chateaus of France or the medieval cities of Spain. You are looking at the remains of a civilization that has passed away. We are not ready, perhaps, to think about visiting Detroit in the same way that we would visit the Palais des Papes in Avignon. But what, really, is the difference?

Europe is a train. The countries are all so close together, train close. A plane is too fast. You must fly over vast quantities of land or sea to get something out of an airplane ride. You have to stare out the window for hours at the unchanging surface of the ocean or the mesmerizing openness, for instance, of the American plains. To understand space in Europe you have to be on a train.

You sit near the window in your compartment. There are the forward-sitters and the backward-sitters. Both have their logic. Forward-sitters like to see what is coming, they tend to feel positive about the European Union. Backward-sitters are a more melancholy lot. They think of Europe as something you grab glimpses of after the fact, after it has already passed us by. Thus we see that space has something to do with time.