Listening to Handel's Messiah from Moscow. All of this is still one disjointed, fractious, warring and confused project of the Enlightenment. Bloody wars under battling tricoleurs. So -- focus on the work of the Enlightenment. Don't get distracted with more transcendental thoughts. (These are notes-to-self.)
And yet, this is a very ponderous and unwieldy reading of it. Tones are very careful, and there is a rounded beauty to some moments that I've not heard before. But the heavy tones of centuries of Orthodoxy are obscuring the work that rings so clearly in the brash sunlit uplands of the Scottish and German Enlightenment. I remember a Samson and Deliah in Bucharest at the beginning of this peregrination -- I was reading Milton's Samson in the interval, and realized that I needed to think with Milton, rather than the with the dark, romantic tones of these eastern orthodoxies.
Being a Westerner, I should reason as a Westerner. The quickness of the mind, the Anglo-American law, German and British philosophy (with the odd American mixed in). Intellectually, nativism consists of placing yourself in the way of working with which you have greatest facility. Beckett wrote in French, but Beckett didn't write in order to write. His understanding of things was already complete when he staged some scenarios in order to show us how things are. If the world is still an active question, if there is hope, then we have to cling to the homelands of the mind, and its most familiar languages.
Which means that we need to take up the mantle of the Enlightenment in the context of effective history, even abroad.