I felt I couldn’t escape the sanatorium-view of snow that Thomas Mann portrays in The Magic Mountain. The lines: "It always snowed, snowed without a pause, endlessly, gently, soundlessly falling...this world of limitless silences had nothing hospitable" kept coming back in Aspen, Colorado, where snow had acquired the depressing colour of recession that has hit the US. When my co-passenger on the flight said he wanted the slopes to cheer him up before he came out of retirement and set up his psychiatric practice again, I felt that a town known for its skiing holidays had become a therapeutic destination. This co-passenger, about 65, had lost nearly 40 per cent of his pension money in the financial meltdown.
However, I didn’t go to Aspen for a cure or to ski. I went there to re-read Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mencius, Machiavelli and Marx among others and discuss the future of politics. Even amidst enlightened talk, snowy desolation had its presence in the Aspen Institute’s seminar hall. A co-participant, a tenured professor from Arizona State University, confessed that she had been "furloughed". A euphemism to mean you are not fired, but should stay away from work for a prescribed number of days and take a pay cut. On furlough days, the professor can’t use the library, or her office or send e-mails from her official ID.
