Today during coverage of Dubai's debt crisis I heard for the umpteenth time since the recession began a reporter mention "the old Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times.'" This is one of my pet peeves. This "curse" isn't Chinese in origin, and it's not that old. The popularity of the saying dates back only to 1966, when Robert F. Kennedy mentioned it in a speech.

I suppose the sentiment behind the proverb also irks me. One of my most vivid memories is spending time in Lithuania in 1990, after the Soviet republic had declared independence but before Moscow had recognized its sovereignty. People expected tanks any day. In Kaunas a man showed me the impromptu memorial that had sprung up where Romas Kalanta burned himself to death in 1972 to protest the Soviet occupation. In Vilnius I watched a parade of Poles who had marched across the border illegally to signify their solidarity with "their brothers' and sisters' struggle." You felt history happening.

Very different from the feel of life, say, five years earlier in the United States, during the reign of Reagan, when "history" to me meant wearing tie-dye shirts to class on Sixties Day and an adult’s calling something "of historical importance" meant it had a large audience share on TV.

So, if any of you have ever been tempted to generalize about "interesting times," I give you a different text to ponder, a poem titled "Tsiteron" (Cicero) by the Russian poet Fiodor Tiutchev. It was composed sometime around 1829 or 1830, and it expresses the author's envy for someone like Cicero who, despite all his kvetching about Rome going to hell in a hand basket, had the privilege of a watching truly world-historical events unfold:

Оратор римский говорил
Средь бурь гражданских и тревоги:
"Я поздно встал - и на дороге
Застигнут ночью Рима был!"
Так!.. Но, прощаясь с римской славой,
С Капитолийской высоты
Во всем величье видел ты
Закат звезды ее кровавый!..

Блажен, кто посетил сей мир
В его минуты роковые!
Его призвали всеблагие
Как собеседника на пир.
Он их высоких зрелищ зритель,
Он в их совет допущен был -
И заживо, как небожитель,
Из чаши их бессмертье пил!

* * *

Orator rimskii govoril
Sred' bur' grazhdanskikh i trevogi:
"Ia pozdno vstal - i na doroge
Zastignut noch'iu Rima byl!”
Tak! . . No, proshchaias’ s rimskoi slavoi,
S Kapitoliiskoi vysoty
Vo vsem velich’e videl ty
Zakat zvezdy ee krovavyi!..

Blazhen, kto posetil sei mir
V ego minuty rokovye!
Ego prizvali vseblagie
Kak sobesednika na pir.
On ikh vysokikh zrelishch zritel’,
On v ikh sovet dopushchen byl-
I zazhivo, kak nebozhitel’,
Iz chashi ikh bessmert’e pil!

* * *

The Roman orator used to say
Amid civil strife and alarm,
“I got up late--and on the road
Rome was overtaken by night!”
True . . . but from a Capitoline height,
While saying farewell to Roman glory,
You saw in all its greatness
The bloody setting of its star!

Happy is he who’s visited this world
During its fateful minutes!
The all-blessed ones call to him
As one calls company to a feast.
He’s a witness of their lofty show,
He’s been admitted to their council,
And, like a resident of heaven,
He’s drunk immortality from their cup.

Some Russian critics have tried to tie the poem to the French Revolution of 1830, but I suspect it predates it. Tiutchev, an ardent Slavophile and a supporter of the autocratic tsar Nicholas I, was no Delacroix. He was never especially moved by the stirrings of le peuple. He did, however, grasp people's deep longing to be caught up in momentous events. The world can be otherwise: when you experience that truth first-hand, you feel both the giddiness of boundless possibility and the fear that everything you've relied on can vanish in an instant. You live, in short, more intensely. It’s exhilarating.

Of course, in most cases it’s also hugely risky. My own brush with the “setting of a star,” however, was from a position of relative safety. Back in 1990, I wasn’t worried that tanks would roll down the streets of my home town. Alaska and California weren’t on the verge of seceding. I was an eyewitness, not a refugee, exile, or political prisoner. So my peeves and passions on this subject are, I admit, rather suspect.

A year later though, in August 1991, friends of mine who traveled to the USSR on the same academic exchange ended up choosing to fight on the barricades in front of Moscow’s “White House” in defense of Boris Yeltsin, the democratically elected president of the Russian Republic. Why? One told me that he simply had to, he had no choice. The moment was “fateful,” you could say, and he was called, as “one calls company to a feast,” and he joined the “lofty show.” A few months later, as a direct consequence of the failure the August Putsch, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. “Happy is he . . .”