A Greek Cypriot medical colleague of mine sometimes pays us a social visit, and I ask her as a favor to recite Cavafy in Greek, a language I do not speak or understand. The sound of the poetry alone is to me beautiful: but knowing it in translation, I am able to catch a word or two. The experience moves me deeply for reasons that I cannot quite analyze.

Her husband, as it happens, is a Greek from Alexandria, also a doctor, born in the year of Cavafy’s death. His has been what to me seems a dispiriting trajectory in life, from the capital of memory (in Lawrence Durrell’s phrase) to an English suburb where memory is abjured: from a life of cosmopolitan cafés to one of attention to the banal and mostly imaginary ailments of the bored and unhappy. But I suppose that everywhere, looked at aright, is exotic: it is the quality of the observer, not what is observed, that is important. Perhaps the Greek Alexandrian doctor took to heart, and not merely to mind, Cavafy’s warning about the impossibility of finding fulfilment elsewhere, and therefore the futility of attributing dissatisfaction to one’s geographical location: You say, “I’ll go to another country, to other shores./ I’ll succeed in finding another city, better than this,/ Where all my efforts are doomed in advance.”