Life in Montre-Lola

Tomorrow: 2020 Complete Guide to Vekllei

Today:

Up in the ro, the Vekllei flower-tundra home to spirits and people alike, green slopes and igneous monument make an ample crucible for myth and magic.

Out here, there was a very keen sense of place and purpose. “Landscape” was neither revered nor ignored, since it did not exist here altogether. Every hill, rock and tree was taken at face value in its full honesty, with commodity dead and modernism suppressed. The place supported human life, and human life supported place. It was intuitive symbiosis.

Tzipora’s house was built by the hands of her friends with wood from the forest nearby and concrete from Adouisneh. They built her a fireplace big enough to keep her loft warm and the bread hot. She was a small girl and had to split her wood with a pedal saw, which she fed wood from her journeys for kindling.

She cycled to the village a kilometre down the road each morning, where she worked in the district library. People from villages nested in the hills and valleys made the commute here, to see films and borrow books. It was funny to her that the scope of the books were so worldly and comprehensive, and that the lives here were so small and pleasant. Living like this, the whole world seemed like a distant curiosity, far removed from their concern.

Much like the inversion of the sublime, Tzipora found an inversion of priority in Montre-Lola too. Time and space seemed to collapse in on themselves here, and all abstractions and petty knowledge was squashed. All that existed was the immediate relationship between herself and her surrounds — the old path and tractor, the flowers and drumlins — each heartbeat after the next, life and death adjacent, the future and past as quiet as the present. In places like this you could live a thousand years.