No one knows quite how to account for the well-established shops in Vancouver, Toronto and other cities that deal exclusively in fountain pens and fine fountain-pen accessories. Looking at their merchandise, which begins with Sheaffer products and hurries up the price scale to those by Cartier and Visconti, one is reminded of the concurrent vogue in places dealing in hand-rolled cigars. Are such businesses dens of conservatism, catering to certain people’s nostalgia for plutocracy? Or are they a sign of resistance to the accelerating pace of greedy modern life?

The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.

Here’s how all this began. There’s a shop in my neighbourhood near English Bay in Vancouver that sells swimwear all year round, though more of it in the summer than in the cold, wet months, when First Beach is deserted except for treasure hunters with metal detectors, dogs retrieving Frisbees and individuals who look so disconsolate that I fear they may be contemplating suicide. When passing by this shop in early spring I was surprised to see a window display of bikinis made to look like military camouflage, in the familiar green-and-brown woodland pattern.

Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is a fading one-time French colonial outpost on a spot where a bend in the Mekong River makes room for a large tear-shaped island directly opposite the centre-ville, which runs only far enough back from the riverbank to allow a few commercial streets. The new bridge to Thailand is a short distance way. Thai-style wats and other temples, minor and major, are everywhere.