Xanadu

Maybe read the astronomical document "Cassini RADAR images at Hotei Arcus and western Xanadu, Titan: Evidence for geologically recent cryovolcanic activity."

Maybe read the astronomical document "Regional geomorphology and history of Titan’s Xanadu province."

The morning was drizzling, this 28th of December of 2024. (Incidentally, there are 28 letters in the Esperanto alphabet.) I walked to Tim Hortons, there to eat a croissant and a hash brown, and to drink an oat milk iced coffee. Amongst the vendors were handsome men, Joban and Pushpak. The ladies were pretty. They were all South Asians. There was a fat Eurasian boy toddler with his white mama and Sinospheric papa amongst the customers. At our house, Rex, the cousin of my cousin Eve, arrived from the states. A devout Roman Catholic Filipino, he was wearing a necklace with a hanging crucifix when he greeted me. I exclaimed "Mr. Lingo!": Like I, he has been a long-time language fanatic, and now he is learning Portuguese and Polish. He knows that my "favourite" is Esperanto. He amused himself with my dark red T-shirt with the vertical phrase in white letters in Spanish: "¡Las estrellas son Australias!" ("The stars are Australias!" about outer space and potential future colonies on the cold and hot desert worlds beyond our Earth). I was wearing also a red baseball cap with yellow lettering of "XANADU, TITAN": a reference to a mystical region on Saturn's moon. Rex would be sojourning with my Filipino family, here on Lulu Island, for the weekend visit. He earlier communicated that he would want "bubble tea" from here. I complimented Rex that he still "looks the same" from decades ago.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.

A place where nobody dared to go The love that we came to know They call it Xanadu And now, open your eyes and see What we have made is real We are in Xanadu

That's from the poem of the legend of Kubla Kahn's palace in the lost valley of Xanadu! Alph was the river in the legend! Unca Scrooge, this is the road to Xanadu! You've hit the jackpot! The most wondrous valley on earth! The land of milk and honey!

The lyric, as the ideological critics in particular would have it, plays host to a panoply of enticing pipe dreams conjured up by benighted idealists whose visions are doomed in advance to frustration as reality fails, time and again, to ratify their various Xanadus and Byzantiums.

I never guessed that when I stumbled into the sheriff's office on a warm August afternoon, I'd met my future. I'd had no dream of finding my own little Eden, my snowcapped paradise, my Xanadu in the Valley of the Sky.

“The United States in the twenties was dotted with a thousand Xanadus,” wrote movie-theater historian Ben Hall."

The postmodern Xanadus that support this hallucination in the desert offer a particularly attractive paradise of the popular.