Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, a dashing figure from a more heroic age, died yesterday at the improbable age of 96. The Daily Telegraph, as usual, had the best obituary, highlighting his accomplishments as a war commando and scholar while granting a certain skepticism as to the overall veracity of his superb travel memoirs A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, in which he recounted, many years later, his long walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1934. "Though he at first kept to his aim of travelling 'like a tramp or pilgrim,' sleeping in police cells and beer halls, by the time he reached Central Europe his charm led to his being passed from schloss to schloss by a network of margraves and voivodes. The architecture, ritual and genealogy of each halt were later recalled with a loving eye."
 
I love that "network of margraves and voivodes." It reminds me of Gregor von Rezzori, another recently vanished survivor of a pre-modern Eastern Europe. They're a pair, von Rezzori and Leigh Fermor, but the latter was more Hellenic, in the mold of Ulysses: clever, learned, wild, and above all a lover of life. If I had another go-around, I'd want it to be like Leigh Fermor's.