I wrote this book when I was seventeen, shortly after the communists caught me crossing the Czech-Austrian border, trying to get away from behind the proverbial Iron Curtain. At the time, there was no War on Terror, and even if there had been, I probably would not have known about it I was just a child eager to experience Zephyr s unbounded joy, singing my own Ode, wondering at daff odils though puzzled not by the characters on a Grecian urn but by the rigid, stale, and spineless character of those alive, those around me. It is not human hands that build walls, but human mind I concluded...