2HeadedTurtle.com

Confronted with the pain of Asia, one cannot look and cannot turn away. In India, human misery seems so pervasive that one takes in only stray details: a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog eating withered grass, an ancient woman lifting her sari to move her shrunken bowels by the road. Yet in Varanasi there is hope of life that has been abandoned in such cities as Calcutta, which seems resigned to the dead and dying in its gutters. Shiva dances in the spicy foods, in the exhilarated bells of swarming bicycles, the angry bus horns, the chatter of the temple monkeys, the vermilion tikka dot on the women’s foreheads, even in the scent of charred human flesh that pervades the ghats. The people smile — that is the greatest miracle of all.

— Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

MADRID, Spain — More than 20,000 things people left on planes and at airports, including a wedding dress and a pair of rudimentary stilts, were auctioned off Tuesday as Madrid’s airport cleared out its lost-and-found department.

The items were divided up into nine lots, such as clothes and jewelry, and prospective buyers submitted bids over a one-week period that ended Monday. Most were merchants who run secondhand stores, said the national flagship carrier Iberia, which organized the sale.