Remembering how much he had enjoyed his high school French class, Barnaby recently bought a copy of Du côté de chez Swann. Feeling very well satisfied with himself, he slipped the unopened book into his pocket and went downstairs to Two Boots.

As he stood in line, his eyes affixed themselves like ancient stars to one particular red wedge: it was covered in tiny shrimps that promised the languor of New Orleans leavened by the sere romantic malice of the sea. His mouth began to water, as it had when, as a child, he had reverently watched his mother pour a can of Progresso minestrone soup into a saucepan on the stove. But the red of that soup, in his memory, at least, had been simple and wholesome, while the mottled color of the pizza, ranging from orange to crimson to almost yellow, was impossibly complex. What strange colony of spices combined in its alluring sauce? Suddenly he felt a tapping at his side.

Barnaby looked up and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed woman with her hair in a braid, simply dressed, pleasant, discreet. There was a single strand of pearls around her throat. Pointing seriously at the book in his pocket, she said, “This is the best book ever written.”

“Yes,” Barnaby coughed, “I haven’t quite finished it yet, but so far I agree.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what was your favorite line?”

“No,” he replied, placing two plump fingers upon her delicate, porcelain arm, “I refuse to read that way. To isolate a single line would be, so to speak, like admiring the butterfly’s dizzying flight while dismissing the beauty of its wings. I prefer to let the author’s pen speak to the harmony of my soul without division.”

“That’s beautiful,” she murmurred, gazing deeply into his eyes. Barnaby’s own gaze dropped down to her neckline and he felt himself deeply in love. But before he could gather the courage to speak—to ask her name, to venture his own, to remark that he kept a room in a nearby hotel—she had collected her Sicilian end piece and walked out.

All his life Barnaby had been afflicted by a stutter in the presence of beautiful women. It was an ongoing pain to him to think that the mellifluous tongue that served him so well at stag parties, always ready with an incisive analogy or vulgar joke—how often had he not cried, “He’s the motherfucker that killed my frog!” and been rewarded with hearty laughter—should consistently fail him just at the critical, infantine beginnings of so many a great romance. But this thought had never pained him so terribly as it did tonight: tonight, when kindly or capricious fate had placed before him the plump, dark, pretentious sexpot of his dreams! Tonight, when all he had wanted—or needed—to say was, “Allow me to lend you a thousand francs!”

“Buddy!” shouted the counterman, a red-faced teenager with his hair in a topknot. “What’ll you have?”

Desparing of the world and of himself, Barnaby ordered five slices and a gallon of root beer. Later that night, kept from the healing oblivion of sleep by mysterious pains in his belly, Barnaby remembered the book. He brewed himself a cup of tisane à verveine, lit a single candle, and climbed into bed.

“Longtemps,” he read, “je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: 'Je m'endors.'”

Barnaby stared at these lines for several minutes, lost in thought; at last, as he extinguished the candle, he remarked to himself, “On second thought, I think I took Spanish.”

Last Thursday night Barnaby got drunk and woke up in Montreal. Calmly he got out of bed, washed his face, put on his corduroy suit, and tiptoed out of what turned out to be a bed-and-breakfast in the neighborhood Montrealers call “the gay village.” He found a diner nearby in which to have a croissant and cafe au lait, and after the waitress had asked for his order in what sounded like French, and he had replied likewise, he looked out the window and considered his options.

He saw a city with many pretty churches and parks, with excellent restaurants and a few good museums and universities, and the best baklava in North America; but a city, also, that was not entirely thriving, that had thousands of people struggling and begging on the street, a city that, its pockets of rich comfort notwithstanding, did not entirely keep out the cold. But his memories of youthful trips to Montreal were rosy and sweet, and he had nowhere else to be—he decided to call up a friend and make a weekend of it.

“After all,” he said to the waitress as she set down his croissant, “quand la vie te donne de citrons, il faut que tu fasses de citron pressé.”

“That’s all right, sir,” the waitress replied. “I speak English.”

After calling his friend and asking to sleep on his floor that night, the first thing Barnaby did was stroll over to the Gallimard bookstore on Boulevard St.-Laurent. There he spent a happy hour browsing through elegantly designed French books that were, for the most part, not at all expensive. He chose a Voltaire, a Camus, and a Perec, and then, in the box of Editions Allia next to the cash register, between a book by Werner Heisenberg and a paperback collection of dirty American comics, he found a short book of Antonio Vieira’s “Sermon of the Good Thief,” Le Sermon du Bon Larron. According to the book’s cover, Vieira was a 17th century Jesuit priest, alternately in and out with royals and bigshots, who fought the power of the Holy Inquisition and argued for the rights of “new Christians” (Marranos) and natives in the Americas, and was one of the great Portuguese prose stylists. Barnaby, who does not read, had never heard of him.

The next thing Barnaby did, all these books in hand, was stroll a few more blocks up St.-Laurent and join the enormous line of people waiting to get into Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, most of them, like Barnaby, tourists intending to eat “smoked meat” sandwiches. (Smoked meat is like Canadian pastrami.) Barnaby leaned against the building and opened the Vieira book, discovering a brilliant and thrilling writer.

Christ, as we know from Peanuts Christmas specials, was crucified between two thieves; and he, the king of kings, took the thieves with him to Paradise, but in this world it is usually the other way around—it is thieves that lead kings to hell.

In order to attack corruption among colonial governors, Vieira begins by demonstrating, with scriptural references, that thefts cannot be forgiven if the thieves have the power to repay them, but do not. Then he argues that kings are responsible for the thievery of men they appoint—thus do the thieves carry their kings to hell. For even God himself was crucified—Vieira says—to repay the sin of Adam in Eden, because it was he who had put him there. God foresaw that Adam would sin, but placed him in Eden as he was, before he sinned, and likewise chose Judas as a disciple judging him only as he was at that time. So similarly, if kings appoint men they know to be good when they are appointed, they might be forgiven their subsequent crimes; but they do not. Do kings wish to know whether the men they appoint are honest? Vieira asks. Let them refer to the words of Christ:

“Qui non intrat per ostium,” Barnaby sang out, startling several old women from Idaho, waiting for their sandwiches, “fur est et latro!” He who does not enter through the front door is a brigand and a thief. In other words, Vieira explains, government officials appointed through favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, or anything else other than the strictest and most impartial weighing of merit are ipso facto thieves, because they have stolen their positions. No one can claim to be surprised when they go on to commit further crimes.

Vieira ends his sermon by calling the bluff of institutional hypocrisy so brilliantly and forcefully that Barnaby almost wept. Surely no one can disagree, he says, with his suggestion that corrupt governors be dismissed and made to repay what they have stolen. Their victims, of course, will agree; and the king, too, who will thereby save his own soul and theirs from eternal hellfire, surely he must agree; and even the thieves themselves, who might be expected to resist—surely they value their eternal souls more than transient goods that one way or the other they will lose when they die? Surely they prefer being punished briefly on earth to being punished eternally in hell? Or do our Christian leaders not, in fact, believe in the Final Judgment they claim to believe in?

“The problem,” Barnaby said to the waiter, once he had been seated in long and narrow Schwartz’s, “is that our Christian leaders, unlike those of seventeenth century Portugal, are Protestants who believe in justification by faith alone, and who think that they can do whatever they want so long as they believe in Jesus. Perhaps if Bush were a Portuguese Roman Catholic, he would fire Alberto Gonzales—and Condi Rice—and Dick Cheney—and Karl Rove—and himself. But no, I shouldn’t say that—a Bush of any other denomination would still find a way to be an asshole. One smoked-meat sandwich, medium, a half sour pickle, and a can of cherry soda.”

“You got it,” replied the waiter, and from there the day went downhill. First Barnaby lost his appetite watching the men at the next table, a stag party who had come to Montreal for its famous strip clubs. They each ate an enormous smoked meat sandwich, two whole handfuls of pastrami with extra fat, and then the fattest of them ordered a grilled steak bigger than a plate. To go with this all, a tiny dish of coleslaw, diet soda, and hot peppers, the last of which the fattest one rejected: “I don’t need no hot peppers, B,” he said to the waiter.

“Excuse me,” Barnaby said, leaning over and tapping him on the meaty biceps. “Forgive me for being nosy, but how many weeks has it been since you had a bowel movement?”

As Barnaby strolled up seedy St.-Laurent Boulevard, holding a wad of napkins against his bloody nose, toward Avenue Mont-Royal, and then down Mont-Royal toward the park, he considered the question further. Certainly the “born again” types like Bush had pledged themselves to an illiterate and contrary understanding of their own theology; surely mainline Protestantism—ephemeral antinomian movements excluded—does not mean to preach that you can do whatever you want so long as you believe in Jesus. But it does seem particularly liable to that misreading, and Barnaby asked himself whether subtle ideas that, when misunderstood, have catastrophic consequences, are not better off left unpromulgated. It is nothing, necessarily, to do with Christianity—in Japan, for example, Shinran Shonin came up with his own salvation-entirely-by-grace doctrine as an Amidist Buddhist. Indeed, perhaps it is not necessarily to do with anything—perhaps religious doctrines, cultural values, and all the rest of it are only so much window dressing, endlessly flexible, that can always be adapted one way or another to camouflage man’s basest instincts. Perhaps the meat-watching, meat-eating fraternity men at Schwartz’s were not “subscribing” to a peculiarly American ideal of machismo—perhaps they were just assholes.

Later that afternoon, after a wheezing hike up and down Mont Royal, Barnaby made his way to a gallery deep within the Art Department of Concordia University, where his friend Patrick was asleep in a chair, looking like a young Dylan Thomas in bluejeans. He was showing a piece called “Skyline.” He had built a computer program that was slowly but steadily erasing all the MP3 files in one particular music-sharing network; as the files were erased, their lengths altered another program which projected a series of pulsing white rectangles on the floor and played an eery, wave-like soundtrack. Patrick rubbed his eyes and stood up, and together they stared down into the terrifying, beautiful void he had constructed, a wolf-like face of nihilistic perfection.

Patrick taught Barnaby everything he knows about boosting crudité, and both on principle and for practical reasons refuses to spend money on food; so Barnaby, grateful for his hospitality (and under the impression that every one of his American dollars would buy him two Canadian) offered to take him out to dinner. They had a long, raucous, wine-besozzled dinner, arguing about art and bragging about sexual conquests, or vice versa, and stumbled into Patrick’s basement on St.-Viateur well after three in the morning.

The following day, as Barnaby stared at his credit card receipts and reckoned out the cost of a train ticket home, and he and his friend both sipped beef boullion and chewed aspirin tablets, Barnaby casually asked Patrick the exchange rate. Pat replied that it was almost to par. Barnaby clutched his head.

“You mean those forty-dollar bottles of wine actually cost me forty dollars?” he screamed.

“I guess so,” Patrick said.

“And the panhandling young men,” Barnaby said, “and the half-dead, staggering businesses, and the large immigrant ghettoes, and the oblivious cream of rich people traipsing along like butterflies, and the panhandling old men, and the thriving prostitution, and the quasi-fascist cultural controls, and the increasing rapaciousness on top and desperation on the bottom, and the seediness everywhere that no longer seems so picturesque—that’s not all just someone else’s problem anymore?”

Patrick turned and padded into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Welcome to Earth, America,” he said.

[Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen can be found at schwartzsdeli.com. The Gallimard bookstore in Montreal can be found at gallimardmontreal.com. Patrick Valiquet can be found at fragm.net. Barnaby Sandwich can be found lying on his couch with a cold washcloth on his forehead.]

Yesterday Barnaby attended a lovely tribute to the great writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski in the equally lovely Celeste Bartos Room in the New York Public Library. (The one sour point was when the writers toasted Kapuscinski with vodka on stage. At the Believer event, too, participants drank on stage, and the audience laughed delightedly, as if at a charming transgression, and Barnaby, himself no teetotaller, squirmed—he cannot help thinking it augurs badly for the Republic when people are willing to applaud other people drinking.) Salman Rushdie talked of being forced by Sonny Mehta to concede the excellence of Kapuscinski's book The Emperor; and he recounted that he had once asked Kapuscinski how he had escaped from so many life-threatening situations, how he had waded into innumerable violent, murderous anarchies and walked out again. "I made myself unimportant," was Kapuscinski's reply—he conducted himself in such an unprepossessing manner that it would not have seemed worth anyone's time to shoot him. Later Philip Gourevitch expanded on this point, or rather recast it: in the violent anarchies into which Mr. Kapuscinski went, as a writer, he was unimportant, Gourevitch said—life was cheap; but being unimportant did not bother Kapuscinski.

Barnaby did not know Kapuscinski, although he, like many of the panelists, was greatly impressed and influenced by his book The Emperor, which he came to through a friend's recommendation and an unrelated interest in Ethiopia. But judging from the recollections of his friends and from the brief video clips shown, he seemed to have been, indeed, a charming and wonderful man—a good and humble man. Polish newspaper editor Adam Michnik told another story: He was going to Mexico, and Kapuscinski asked him to say hello to another Polish journalist who worked there. But when Michnik did so, this reporter replied, "Oh! Kapuscinski! I'd love to meet him." Michnik said, "But Kapuscinski says you have met!" The reporter denied it and denied it, but finally remembered that he had once met a skinny young Communist reporter named Riszek. "But he was not yet Kapuscinski then!"

It seemed to Barnaby that this humility was important not only because, as Rushdie said, it allowed Kapuscinski to survive the dangerous places that his work took him to; it was important also because it was only his humility that allowed him to really see those places. He may have been terrified, but he was not preoccupied with his own fear—and so because he had no distracting idea of his own importance, of the significance of his fear or the importance of his safety, he was able, even when afraid, to look with interest and attention at what was going on around him. Such humility, moreover, enabled him to find beauty even in what terrified, disgusted, and appalled—only the addition of a humble and disinterested faculty of wonder could have made something beautiful of Haile Selassie's corruption.

Barnaby, as it happens, spent all of the PEN World Voices festival wrestling with the question of humility and self-importance. He has listened to writers from a dozen nations boast and preen; and he has watched other writers, on the same panels, tacitly allow the boasting and preening because they did not like to combat it with boasting or preening of their own. No one likes to listen to boasting; but at the same time, writing does not take place in a vacuum, and it is no one else's responsibility to investigate whether you might be doing something wonderful—you must tell them. How to go about it? Over the course of the week, Barnaby observed several approaches. There is the Bugs Bunny Defense—tell the audience how many hundreds of thousands of books you have sold in France, but say it with a smile, as when Bugs Bunny turns to the camera and says, "Ain't I a stinker?" (This one works quite well; only the more sophisticated listeners will shudder at the artifice.) There is the Modest Screenwriter Defense—mention a successful movie you have written and modestly suggest that the audience may or may not have heard of it. (This one works perfectly; but it breaks down if you casually but not-quite-apropos-of-anything mention half a dozen famous actors who appeared in the movie.) There is the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Defense, which Barnaby practices, like so:

Pretty Danish woman: "Are you a writer, also?"
Barnaby: "Yes."
Pretty Danish woman: "What do you write?"
Barnaby: "Novels."
Pretty Danish woman: "What kind of novels?"
Barnaby: "Good ones."
(Barnaby looks at his watch and turns away.)

And then, we suppose, there is the Kapuscinski Defense, which can be learned either from the man, or from his books. In The Emperor we see, by a sort of reductio ad nauseam, what is the necessary, horrifying end of the elevation of human personality; in the author's life, as eulogized by his friends, and as highlighted by the interviews shown in the Bartos Room yesterday, we see the contrary, what can be achieved by diligence and self effacement. The Kapuscinski Defense works like this: Respect the interests of the person you are talking to enough to answer his questions, even when they are about your work—but not if they are about your person; respect your work enough to recognize that its merits are not your merits, so that you can talk about its virtues without becoming self important or self satisfied; and recognize, finally, that no man is his own judge, and that the best course is simply to pursue your work quietly and honestly, and let the question of its value, excellence, and importance be indefinitely deferred. Perhaps they will drink to you after your death, or perhaps they will forget you, but you were already immortal, because you lived not in yourself, but in the world.

Barnaby Sandwich has been kept up several nights running by what sounds like an orgy of rats in his sheet rock; and he recently learned the hard way that sauerkraut and sour cream do not mix; but despite sleeplessness and a stomach amok, he has pressed his way through half a dozen more PEN events, among them “Every Day in Africa,” “Voices from Today’s Iran,” “Humor Out of Context,” and “A Believer Nighttime Event.” The good people of PEN have worked hard to assemble a massive and impressive festival of dozens of events and hundreds of people, that must necessarily bridge a variety of tastes and sensibilities; and the same good people have been known, not incidentally, to stand Barnaby to a bowl of Ukrainian borscht when winter’s glistening teeth were piercing him to the bone; but unshaven, haggard, and clutching his belly in both hands, Barnaby was in a mood to stir up trouble.

It began at “Every Day in Africa,” which promised to “offer a glimpse into the richness of the literary voices of Africa.” The writers who were assembled for this glimpse were an Algerian, Yasmina Khadra, who made very strongly the point that Algeria is a Mediterranean—an Arab or Berber—country, not an African one (and who lives in France); an Ivoirienne, Marguerite Abouet, who wrote a graphic novel about everyday life in Côte d’Ivoire—and who also lives in France; a writer from Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who has lived for four decades in England; and a very young man from Harvard who, growing up, spent alternate summers in Nigeria. No doubt this is a problem of logistics: European governments and publishers must surely have more money to spend on sending writers to New York than do, for example, the government of Côte d’Ivoire or publishers in Zanzibar; nevertheless, it made Barnaby grumpy. (Mr. Khadra, the Algerian, did question the premise of the panel—“I was raised by writers,” he said, “and writers have no nationality, they have only talent”—but it was only in the nature of an aside.)

At the next panel, “Travel as Metaphor,” he tried to make a chart of percentages: what percentage of each answer supplied by a writer represented a personal anecdote or boasting, what percentage self promotion, and what percentage an honest attempt to achieve some mutuality and communication. He could not keep up. He grew frustrated with his limited arithmetical skills, and his stubby pencil, and began ripping his note paper, and finally he shot up out of his seat and announced to the auditorium in a loud, unmistakable voice, “My very favorite kind of pasta is spaghetti puttanesca!”

“Sir,” said the moderator, a poetry accountant from Marsh & McLennan, “no one cares what kind of pasta you like—you are not a novelist!”

“In point of fact,” Barnaby replied nasally, “I am—but you’re right, no one cares what kind of spaghetti I like, and I, for my part, don’t care what kind of spaghetti the panelists like. They’re not soap opera stars, and we are not at a cocktail party. For the love of Christ ask them a substantial question, or let them read from their work—I couldn’t give a fuck about their lives or feelings!”

You might like to hear that Barnaby was thrown out on his ear; but of course he wasn’t—he simply sat down again and the panel continued on as before. Five minutes from the end, Barnaby burst from the auditorium, rattled down the stairs, and tumbled into the men’s room for another sauerkraut-induced duel with his lower self.

At “Voices from Today’s Iran,” in the CUNY Graduate Center, Barnaby was interested to note that the panelists wore almost entirely black and white—the dark blue blazer on Robert Silvers, the moderator, was the most colorful touch. Barnaby listened as one writer after another talked about the alternately demoralizing and terrifying situation in Iran—noting, as he listened, that Farsi sounded to his anglophone ears less foreign than, for example, Catalan—and gradually felt his sleepy, dyspeptic grumpiness subside in the face of other people’s genuine problems. But then Mr. Silvers remarked, in his introduction of a writer named Shahriar Mandanipour, that the man was forced to make his living as a librarian because writing “is not lucrative in Iran.”

Once again Barnaby shot up from his seat; this time he raised one hand high up in the air, and the startled Mr. Silvers pointed to him.

“Yes?” said Silvers.

“Thank you,” Barnaby said. “I would like to know what city you live in, Mr. Silvers.”

Mr. Silvers—editor of the New York Review of Books—furrowed his brow.

“This one,” he said. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Barnaby repeated, and sat down.

Of course these writers had been brought here to talk about the situation in their own country, not the situation here; but Barnaby would have liked to hear some comparison of government versus economic censorship.

“You see,” he said later to the nice man behind the counter at Café Rakka, a falafel restaurant on St. Mark’s Place, “people get very excited about the power of the internet, about how anyone can blog about anything, but the fact is that the culture in general, and therefore most people’s mental landscapes—the room they have for new ideas—is still to a very large extent determined by enormous media corporations whose control is concentrated in a very small number of hands. I can put whatever I want on a blog, but no one will read it; or a few people will read it; but I’m shouting into a hurricane compared to the New York Post—or to whichever chick lit novel the Times best seller list thinks is hot this week. In this country you’re free to say whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will listen. It doesn’t mean that anyone can hear you. Try going into a noisy dance club and talking to someone you don’t know about human papillomavirus—no one will stop you. We’re so fixated on the right to free speech in this country that we rarely talk about other distortions of the culture—we rarely consider what free speech is worth in the face of controlled and limited attention. Don’t get me wrong—free speech is worth fighting and dying for, and God bless those that do, and I would certainly rather wither in the face of benign or indifferent or even malign neglect than actually go to jail, or see books pulped; but we do our free culture no service by pretending that it is not deeply troubled and in danger itself. Two men stood outside the Graduate Center today handing out cards for a bookstore called ‘Revolution,’ and even I threw their card away.”

“Yes, my friend,” said the man behind the counter, with a smile that radiated pure humanitarian benevolence. “Hot sauce? Onions?”

“Just a little,” Barnaby replied. He had a Turkish coffee as well, and he wondered why he had seen so many dressed-up Sikh families walking north through Madison Square Park that afternoon.