If one is retrospect, or merely stands far enough away from things, it’s easy to see that the guiding pattern of my life has been Ethiopia. When I was a painter, I painted our modern transformation—the blending of our old country and the sudden and disconcerting arrival of the new—and gave it to the wider world. When art abandoned me, I became a purveyor of that commodity most sought and least available in the city where I was born: security. And now, in what must likely be the last act of my age, I have returned to art and am designing the future, as the Emperor did—though with the obliquity of the millennium, I have built a future to be avoided, and hidden within it hints of the one to be desired. I am the sum of my country, however tenuous our lingering connection, and even if my Ethiopia travelled down a path at an angle to the rest of the world, and was replaced by one that does not welcome me, and that I have never seen.