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It is Sunday at midnight, and I write in Switzerland, where I am staying for a week before leaving to spend the year in Jordan. I thought of waiting until tomorrow to begin but decided that elegies are better written in the middle of the night—and an elegy for Mahmoud Darwish is best written in a country where one feels foreign, gazing at a dark horizon with a glass of wine in hand.

Because of course, that was Darwish’s favorite posture. In his final poems, he narrates from a perspective that became strangely archetypal for him. He writes as the man in the café. The man in the café: cigarette; glass of wine; Paris, London, Damascus, Manhattan unfolding in front of him, their ambient sounds and sights transformed into echolalia, urban tumbleweeds, beloveds. The eternal traveler, drifting from place to place in exile, weighted by the sorrow and wisdom of knowing a land he cannot return to, which, because he cannot see it directly, he must instead overlay upon whatever city is currently under his gaze.

One of his collections is called Unfortunately, It Was Paradise—an elegant phrase to summarize the paradox of the exile, the reason that a homeland cannot be forgotten, regardless of its state of ruin. I remember an argument I had about Hurricane Katrina, in which a friend asserted that to rebuild the levies was a waste of federal funds, that no permanent engineering solution existed, that New Orleans would never not be in jeopardy from floods and hurricanes.