While I have been to older places, Vianden Castle in Luxembourg remains one of the most memorable…

Our trip to the canton of Vianden—and Vianden Castle—in Luxembourg occurred during the summer of 2000. I was traveling through Europe on something of a club tour with a group of close friends. We had just spent two weeks in Ibiza, and we had arrived back in Amsterdam. Looking for something to do one Saturday, we rented a car on the spur of the moment and decided to drive South into Luxembourg to see some of the castles there. The drive South was beautiful as we passed through The Netherlands, drove across Belgium, and eventually wound up in Luxembourg. Northern Luxembourg is only a bit more than ten miles wide, and Vianden rests near the Eastern border with Germany.

We began the day by going first to Luxembourg City in the South, where we learned that the people of Luxembourg remain some of the most unfriendly in all of Europe. It was all we could do to get directions to an ATM machine—many of the people, although they speak German, French, and English, refuse to speak in anything but Luxembourgish (yes, they have their own language). I suppose our little excursion to the tiny country's capital proves that national and cultural pride are inversely proportional to a country's physical size:) After finally managing to get both some money and a bit of food, we followed our map East into the Moselle Valley, where we stopped briefly at several castles. Continuing North from there, toward the Ardennes Forest, we eventually ended up in Vianden in the middle of the afternoon and ended up staying there (and visiting the remarkable castle) until sundown.

The town and canton of Vianden, which rests in the valley below the castle, traces its origins back to the Gallo-Roman age, when there was a castellum on the site of the present castle. Vianden itself was originally known as Viennensis, probably derived from the Celtic vien ("rock"). The first historical reference to Vianden was in 698, and the town itself possesses one of the oldest charters in Europe, granted in 1308 by Philip II, count of Vianden, from whom the family of Nassau-Vianden sprang, and who was consequently the ancestor of William of Orange (you can see here why I had a particular affinity for the history of the place—its roundabout connection to Princeton, my alma mater, many generations later).

Vianden Castle was built between the 11th and 14th centuries on the foundations both of the old Roman fortress and a later Carolingian refuge. It remains one of the largest and most well-preserved feudal residences of the romanesque and gothic periods in Europe. The chapel and the small and large palaces, respectively, originate from the end of the 12th and the first half of the 13th century. The 'Quartier de Juliers' on the western side of the large palace, originated from the beginning of the 14th century. Until the beginning of the 15th century it was the seat of the influential Counts of Vianden, a line of nobles who enjoyed close connections not only to the Royal Family of France, but also to the German imperial court. In 1417, the lands of the canton passed by inheritance to the House of Nassau, and thus the castle no longer served as the official residence of the counts. People can still see the rich architecture the House of Nassau inherited, since nothing further was changed or built after that point. Over the next few centuries, a victim of neglect, the castle fell into a state of ruin. Finally, after its ownership was transferred to the state in 1977 by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, the ancient fortress was finally restored to its former glory. It has become an important historical monument, not only for Luxembourg but for all of Europe.

We happened to see the castle on a perfect summer day, and from its towers you can literally see beyond Luxembourg's borders into Germany. The modern town of Vianden, quaint and still somewhat medieval in its atmosphere (a quality unique to Europe, as anyone who has traveled there can attest), snakes through the valley below. While I still have many pictures from that day, for me the memory remains even stronger. I think that sometimes we experience certain moments in time, mentally "freezing" those that move us the most, or affect us more deeply than others, or change our underlying personal compass in some manner that we can't quite identify. This was one of those experiences for me. I'll keep it with me for the rest of my life.

The book that introduced me to "expatriate nihilism" and changed my outlook on life forever…

During college I would go through different "writer periods" where I would skip class and sit in a booth in the Burger King on Nassau Street in Princeton, NJ, reading book after book. I would normally choose a writer I liked and literally read everything I could find by him. It was September or October of my sophomore year when I discovered my first Hemingway "expatriate" novel—The Sun Also Rises (I'm sure I had to read "The Old Man and the Sea" in High School, but that book isn't part of the same canon). I couldn't put the book down, and I probably read the thing eight or ten more times over the next several years. It led me to other, similar books like "A Movable Feast" and "The Great Gatsby" (yes, I know the difference between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but in a very real sense it was Hemingway that led me to Fitzgerald, even though I was attending Fitzgerald's alma mater and his name was pretty much everywhere—in fact, a friend of mine lived in a quad in Rockefeller College with a wooden window seat upon which FSF supposedly carved his initials). It also eventually led me to contemporary writers whose stories bore modern similarities to their forbears—writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.

How did "The Sun Also Rises" open my eyes? It showed me that the trappings and characters of polite society could be simultaneously seductive and grotesque. In certain ways I related to Jake, not in the sense of his physical infirmity, but much like Nick Carraway in "The Great Gatsby," I related to his essential goodness and eventual resignation to the types of people he would continue to attract and by whom he would most likely be surrounded throughout his life. Remember: I was a public school kid at Princeton at the time. I had friends with private planes at the local airport, and I certainly knew girls like Brett Ashley. But more than that, there was an attraction to the idea of the expatriate lifestyle that, at the time, seemed difficult to resist. I had spent several months in France after my senior year in high school, and my young mind (I think) felt that it could relate to Jake's inner conflict and eventual ambivalence. because, in the end, that's what these books were about—the ambivalence of the wealthy, the shallow, or the simply disinterested just trying to fill up their days. And even after all the drinking, beaches, card games, and bull fights, you can still feel the desperate emptiness. And I think there was a time, when I was drifting a bit aimlessly through college, when I could relate to that…

It's funny, but the parallels throughout what I consider the larger "young nihilistic" canon are unmistakable. At the end of "The Sun Also Rises," as Jake is riding in the cab through Madrid to deliver her back to Mike, Brett sadly remarks that she and Jake could have had a wonderful time together. And he responds, "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?" At the end of "Less Than Zero," Blair and Clay meet for one last time at a restaurant overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and her final words to him are, "You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it." I always loved that line…

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