Conclusion

Summary

There is a word in Arabic that I heard uttered over and over in the city; ghamidh, meaning ‘mysterious’ or ‘ambiguous’. If Baghdad's soul is loss, its mood always seemed to be ghamidh. Through that word, I began, at first in a woefully superficial way, to understand the panorama of attitudes that is Baghdad. Communicating that shifting truth has been a challenge.

Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War (New York, 2005), p. 10

Such massive physical change has destroyed the mental map that made the old Tibetan culture possible. Lhasa is no longer Lhasa.

Patrick French, Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land (2003), p. 155

Make no mistake, London cannot be called stable on any day covered by this book. ‘The city's sure in progresse’, Thomas Freeman noted nervously in 1614. ‘Shee swarmes’, Donald Lupton wrote, choosing a vivid verb for effect that lets us feel what it was like to sit fretting in a Guildhall hot-seat or with Lupton at his desk in 1632, pen poised, anxieties spinning. By now there was no going back to a time that no one could exactly date or define when things seemed stable and settled. Mind-boggling growth was the reality, that sometimes left people lost for words. Like Lhasa, London was no longer London. It had become ‘the size of half the world’, Venice's ambassador wrote in 1620, in the sort of embroidered rhetoric that was quite typical for these times.