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By CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

New York

‘There is an old song that has thrilled through my soul. . . .” When Robert Burns wrote to his friend Frances Dunlop in December 1788, he was reminiscing with her about friendships past. “Apropos,” he mused, “is not the old Scots phrase, ‘Auld lang syne,’ exceedingly expressive.” The song he then introduced would, of course, become one of the most recognized songs in English. Well, partially in English. To the millions who sing it on the midnight passage from one year to the next, the words of “Auld Lang Syne” remain as cryptic as the melody is ubiquitous. The archaic sound of the Lowland Scots phrases—”we twa hae run about the braes/ and pu’t the gowans fine”—gives it the ring of something both ancient and familiar, just as the song itself is about distance and proximity, about the faraway friend and the one raising a glass with you now.

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

An exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York traces the tangled roots of “Auld Lang Syne,” using printed books and manuscripts, including Burns’s letter to Mrs. Dunlop, to illuminate the genesis of Burns’s poem and the melody we sing it to today. In the process it throws up questions—about the extent of Burns’s authorship, and the aesthetic and political considerations behind the deliberate “intermixing” of Scots and English—that add resonance to the old song, even as they remain unanswerable.

By the time Burns wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, he had become a passionate collector of his native folk songs. He was the chief contributor to two anthologies, the workmanlike “Scots Musical Museum” by James Johnson and the much more ambitious “Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice” by George Thomson, who commissioned musical settings from composers across Europe, including Haydn, Hummel and Pleyel, “the most agreeable composer living” in Thomson’s view. (The manuscript draft of a setting he commissioned from the less agreeable Beethoven is also on show.)

In 1793, Burns sent the text of “Auld Lang Syne” to Thomson, presenting it as “the old Song of the olden times, & which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man singing.” But, as Christine Nelson, the Morgan’s curator of literary and historical manuscripts, notes, Burns made no secret of the fact that he reshaped, amended and edited much of the material he sent in. “Did Burns really just write down what he heard an old man sing or did he entirely rewrite the song?” Ms. Nelson asks.

Among the evidence on display are two other songs sharing the opening line “should old acquaintance be forgot.” The first, cited in a songbook of 1667, “is much more in reference to a love relationship gone bad than friendship,” Ms. Nelson says. Among the verses: “Thou art the most disloyall maid that ever my eyes hath seen.” The other appears in a collection of songs, first published in 1724, by Allan Ramsay, and veers in a more military direction with a line invoking a “return with scars / [from] glorious wars.”

It is probable that Burns rewrote a fragment he had heard on his travels. The wistful remembrance of friends and lovers past maps well onto Burns’s biography: the childhood friends he left behind; the stormy relationship with a certain Clorinda, which ended with her move to Jamaica; the death of his “Highland Mary.” But to claim authorship of the poem would have lessened its authenticity in the eyes of Burns, who relished his own reputation as a “heaven-taught ploughman.”

Collecting and exalting ancestral Scottish culture was both an aesthetic and a political mission for Burns. “There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians,” he wrote of “Auld Lang Syne” in his letter to Mrs. Dunlop. And his correspondence with Thomson shows him vehemently defending the use of the vernacular, even—especially—in songbooks intended for the elegant drawing rooms of London.

There he found a receptive audience. As the exhibits regarding the origins of the “Auld Lang Syne” melody show, these kinds of strathspey dance tunes were in circulation long before this one first became associated with Burns’s poem in Thomson’s “Select Collection” —published in 1799, shortly after the poet’s death. An opera score to William Shield’s “Rosina,” first performed at Covent Garden in 1782, contains a quotation of the melody over a bagpipe-like drone of bassoons and clarinets.

Burns’s fame, already considerable during his short lifetime, became a cult after his death. The Morgan’s exhibit contains a memento of Keats’s pilgrimage to Burns’s tomb in Dumfries, Scotland; a tribute by Sir Walter Scott; and a gushing letter by Sophia Hawthorne. There’s also a modest bunch of pressed wildflowers she and Nathaniel picked on Burns’s Mossgiel Farm—the wild daisies, or gowans, of “Auld Lang Syne.”

Ms. da Fonseca-Wollheim writes about classical music for the Journal.

By MELIK KAYLAN

Benaki Museum, Athens

Part of an encaustic icon of Christ from between the sixth and seventh centuries.

New York

Across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 52nd Street in Manhattan stands a tall, black-glass high-rise. Enter the glitzy atrium lobby, descend a flight of stairs, and quite suddenly you are enveloped by a miniature bubble of the ancient world. You have walked into the Olympic Tower’s Onassis Cultural Center, dedicated to exhibitions about the Hellenic world. Despite having been open since 2000, the center has the air of a pleasantly well-kept secret frequented by dapper elderly scholars and New Yorkers of Greek descent. It’s an ideal lunchtime escape from the nearby Fifth Avenue shopping crowds, especially with the current show. “Transition to Christianity: Art of Late Antiquity, 3rd – 7th Century A.D.” offers a corrective to the rampant consumerism of our day with a condign lesson in Christianity’s classical roots and intense devotions while also reminding us that a trade in objects flourished from its earliest times.

To be sure, the show’s overarching message is scarcely intended to focus on holiday shopping habits. After all, it stays open until May 14. Ancient mosaics, busts, coins, jewelry, glassware, building fragments and the like—some 170 objects in 2,500 square feet of space—have been pooled mostly (but not entirely) from Greek museums to tell us about a critical phase in our collective Western consciousness. From the Greek viewpoint (two of the three curators hail from Greece), these four centuries were not the Dark Ages, despite the Euro-centric conventional wisdom. In recent decades, scholars have used the less pejorative term “Late Antiquity” because, while Rome declined, the eastern Roman Empire known as Byzantium increasingly gathered strength. As the show’s catalog points out, “for much of this time events in Western Europe could be regarded as a sideshow. The east stood out as the more peaceful and prosperous region.”

Yet culturally it was not exactly a stable time, as the curators illustrate repeatedly with objects that are often a patchwork, an uneasy synthesis of the pagan and Christian. From a moment in history when Christians were often persecuted by pagans, the show moves through seven sections to the last gleams of the pagan consciousness as it becomes inexorably stifled under Byzantine-Christian dominance. The underlying message concerns our era: This is how it felt to phase from a stable, coherent world-view toward an unknown outcome, in a period of multicultural fusion and confusion, before the next era of coherence. As the catalog further states, “these poignant fragments of a long-lost age speak to us directly of what it was like, on the ground, to live through an era of mighty transition. . . . It is this that brings them closest to us. For we, also, live in a world of change whose horizons have opened up dramatically. We also do not know the future.”

The show’s seven thematic sections, beginning with “The End of Antiquity” and culminating in “The Genesis of Christian Art” are not strictly chronological, dwelling at times on static snapshots under such themes as “Urban Realities” or “Daily Life.” This being an argument or narrative made through objects, the displays don’t at first dazzle the eye. We have seen mosaics and marbles and coins before. Yet on closer inspection one is gripped by the cumulative effect of seeing pellucidly through a time-window into a vast cultural morphing process.

One learns that sculpture went from the three-dimensional to a kind of bas-relief because Christian doctrine disdained natural representation. As a result, busts had noses hacked off or crosses inscribed onto cheeks or foreheads. Painting, too, lost its fledgling advances in perspective and depth because images began to function as symbols rather than as realistic representations of the observed world. You didn’t need to see saints depicted in exact proportion to anything, even to other saints, because their real proportions existed in heaven.

Yet the archetypal Roman bust of the philosopher as a balding, contemplative figure served well into the Christian centuries as a boilerplate for busts of community elders or painted depictions of saints. And believers continued to hedge their bets with hybrid religious emblems, as illustrated by the extraordinary double-sided stone slab with a Medusa on one side and a cross on the other. Just as churches and basilicas often took over the sites and stones of temples, Christian relics borrowed from pagan aesthetics. The first century Egyptian funerary “Mummy Portraits,” on wood panels, so vivid and naif, inspired styles of Christian icon paintings that lasted well into the 19th century in Russia.

Byzantine authorities stamped out pagan traditions most effectively by superimposing Christian substitutes. A truly poignant object is the patinated bronze sheet with names of Olympic champions inscribed on it from the first century B.C. to A.D. 385, after which the Olympics were outlawed. Horse races in hippodromes took their place. But, as the show palpably demonstrates, the transition lasted an entire age. Pagan gods ultimately went into hiding but pagan customs in many permutations proved immortal.

Mr. Kaylan writes about culture and the arts for the Journal.

By JAVIER ESPINOZA

LONDON–Scott Williams used to commute by train to his job as an IT manager at HSBC in London from Cambridge but found it expensive and time-consuming.

“When my wife first suggested I try carpooling I wasn’t too sure,” the 34-year old Mr. Williams recalls. “I didn’t want to lose the flexibility of being able to listen to the music I wanted or being able to get straight home from work.”

But then he did some math and realized it made sense to share the journey with strangers. So, two years ago, he bought a 1998 Volkswagen Sharan and hasn’t looked back ever since. “It’s reduced the commute by about half an hour. Plus I didn’t want to use the train, which is far too expensive,” he says.

Initially, Mr. Williams signed up to a car-sharing website to find compatible passengers, but now he advertises his journeys on a site he has set up specifically for the purpose. He doesn’t make a profit, and that’s the way he likes it—if he made money from the venture, he would have to register as a business, which would have insurance implications. The amount Mr. Williams charges his passengers varies according to the price of gasoline, he says. At present, his three passengers pay £12.50 per seat per day. This compares with a typical peak-time Cambridge-to-London return train fare of £42.

Mr. Williams also enjoys the social aspects; car-sharing is becoming popular because it reduces costs and people have found they actually enjoy the company, he says. “We have the radio on. I quite like it because it’s such a long journey. We are all professional people, mostly in finance, and we all share a common interest in the economy and current affairs.”

Commuters elsewhere are also coming round to the idea of sharing a ride to work. Sven Domroes, a German commuter who organizes a daily car-share in Stuttgart, says his fellow-countrymen are gradually embracing car-pooling. “When people meet for the first time they talk about the risks of meeting unpleasant people, but I have never had any bad experiences. Plus the idea of sharing your commute is particularly appealing to the younger generations,” he says.

According to Nicolas Brusson, co-founder of carpooling website BlablaCar.com, which operates in France, Spain and the U.K., the practice among commuters has never been so popular. “In 2008 we had almost no members and in three years we went from nothing to 1.5 million members,” Mr. Brusson says. “A rise in petrol prices and the cost of travel in Europe are the two issues really driving the activity of car-sharing.” In London alone, public transport fares rose about 6%.

Mr. Brusson’s website, which is funded by advertising, serves as a forum for drivers to advertise their routes. Both passengers and drivers state their preferences during their journey, for example whether it’s a smoking or non-smoking car or if they prefer a talkative or quiet companion.

What happens if something goes wrong? “One of the things we are constantly trying to improve is essentially to make sure things actually work out, and the biggest risk is people not showing up,” Mr. Brusson says. If the passenger doesn’t show up, the driver, who could have rented the space to someone else, loses out. And a driver no-show is even worse, as the passenger may not have an alternative, Mr. Brusson says.

To discourage bad behavior, BlablaCar.com operates a rating system similar to that of eBay. “User ratings are key,” Mr. Brusson says, “as any driver or passenger not showing up would quickly collect some negative ratings, making it very hard for him/her to find a match next time. In other words, the ratings allow the community to auto-regulate itself and it tends to favor reliable and trustworthy members.”

He expects the number of people in Europe carpooling to work will continue to grow. “I wouldn’t be surprised if car-sharing becomes the de facto low-cost option to travel,” he says.

BlablaCar.com isn’t the only company benefiting from this growth. In Germany, Thomas Teufel founded Fahrgemeinschaft in 2006. He says his business—a car-sharing website that operates like BlablaCar.com—is growing because of changing attitudes among German commuters. “Owning a car has always been a very German thing. German people love their cars but car-sharing means you don’t have your own car. But if you live in the city, the cost of living is rising and the limitation of parking spaces is becoming a bigger issue,” he says.

But not everyone is keen to get into a car with a complete stranger; how do car-sharing companies allay their clients’ worries about safety? “This is of big concern to people,” Mr. Teufel admits. He says companies go to great lengths to verify the identity of drivers advertising journeys online. “We profile every member of our online community. They have to provide us with their names, their IP address, their email address and passport. Women also have the option of only contacting other women, for example,” he says.

Mr. Williams, the Cambridge-London commuter, offers a final word of advice to would-be car-sharers: avoid being too chatty on a Monday. “Typically on a Monday everyone is really miserable and quiet; the conversation builds up towards the end of the week when people tend to be more animated,” he says.

Write to Javier Espinoza at javier.espinoza@wsj.com

Are there any recent novels about the Great Depression of the 1930s? Would you please give me some examples?

—I.J. Satterfield, Austin, Texas

Making art out of suffering: That’s fiction of the Great Depression. Even the novelists of the time found it difficult to put into words what they were seeing first hand. John Steinbeck was supposed to be writing an article on migrants to California for Life magazine, but he was so staggered by the misery he witnessed that he decided he couldn’t possibly be objective.

“The empathetic writer, burdened by a guilty sense of privilege, was invariably radicalized by what he saw on the road, by his exposure to so many marginal and miserable people, the detritus of the American dream,” wrote Morris Dickstein in “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression.”

Steinbeck’s 1939 novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, shaped “a geography of conscience,” Don DeLillo wrote. But to some critics, it was just more pandering and mawkish propaganda that appealed mainly to “liberal middlebrows.” Fiction was politicized by the Depression, sometimes at the expense of the craft. Other so-called proletarian novels published during the Depression (James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy; Erskine Caldwell’s “Tobacco Road”; Jack Conroy’s “The Disinherited”) were also derided as naive, misguided and more ideological than artistic.

The best-seller lists of the 1930s suggest a nation seeking escape rather than faithful reflections of their plight. The best-selling novel of 1932 was Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth”; in both 1933 and 1934 it was “Anthony Adverse” by Hervey Allen, a picaresque historical romance that begins at the end of the 18th century.

I was surprised while researching this question to find how relatively few modern novels are set in the 1930s compared, say, to historical fiction set during the Civil War or the Gilded Age. Oddly, there seem to be more Depression-era novels aimed at young adults than adults, including Christopher Paul Curtis’s “Bud, Not Buddy”; Karen Hesse’s “Out of the Dust”; Richard Peck’s “A Year Down Yonder”; Pam Munoz Ryan’s “Esperanza Rising”; and Mildred D. Taylor’s “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.” Something about adolescents dealing with sudden poverty obviously fires writers’ imaginations—or is there a subconscious desire to show today’s youth just how fortunate they are?

E.L. Doctorow has set several of his novels, including “Loon Lake” and “World’s Fair” in the Depression. William Kennedy (“Ironweed”); Sarah Gruen (“Water for Elephants”); Tony Earley (“Jim the Boy”); and Tom De Haven (“Derby Dugan’s Depression Funnies”) have also found inspiration in the Depression.

A few other contemporary novels set in the 1930s:

“The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers” by Thomas Mullen. The Firefly Brothers are bank robbers who become folk heroes to people who “felt abandoned by country and law and God and all the things they had been taught to believe in…. They were seen as Robin Hoods for a modern, disenchanted and very disorienting age.”

“The Big Both Ways” by John Straley. In the Pacific Northwest in 1935, an unemployed logger joins forces with a union organizer and flees with her (and a couple of dead bodies), eluding pursuers as they sail from Seattle to Alaska.

“Kings in Disguise” by Dan E. Burr and James Vance. A graphic novel about a young man whose unemployed father disappears. The boy hits the road—the railroad—to find him; he also finds hobo jungles and Hoovervilles.

“Clara Callan” by Richard B. Wright. Two Canadian sisters struggle through the Depression, one in a tiny Ontario town, the other in New York City.

There is some superb nonfiction about the Great Depression that’s as compelling as fiction. Studs Terkel’s oral history “Hard Times” was, Mr. Terkel wrote, “an attempt to get the story of the holocaust known as The Great Depression from an improvised battalion of survivors.” Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Since Yesterday” is a concise chronicle of the decade. Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time” tells of the people who, unlike John Steinbeck’s “Exodusters,” stayed in the Dust Bowl during the Depression. And of course James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” with photographs by Walker Evans, packs as powerful a punch today as it did when it was published in 1941.

“In periods of economic crisis,” wrote Mr. Dickstein, “fiction falls in with journalism and photography as a way of documenting human misery and sometimes sentimentalizing its victims.”

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.

By ERIC RIPERT

When I was a little kid, I liked airplane food. It wasn’t hard back then—the food was pretty good, because the airlines were putting some effort into it. I even liked the little trays, how everything fit together.

Today a lot of people complain that the food is lousy on airplanes, the food is lousy in airports. In general, that’s true. I travel all the time, and I see lots of stale, bad-tasting, unhealthy food. But with a lot of trial and error, I’ve also figured out ways to eat well on the road. There’s always time to eat in airports, because flights are always being delayed.

Let’s start with New York, where I live. In the Delta terminal at LaGuardia Airport there’s a restaurant called Crust, which serves wines by the glass and pretty good pizza—thin crust, well seasoned, good-quality ingredients. The place has a modern design and cool light fixtures. You feel like you could be outside instead of in an airport, and the staff move fast but they don’t rush you.

At JFK, the American Airlines terminal has Bobby Van’s Steakhouse. You can sit there, have a decent steak and watch people go by with their luggage. And the Delta terminal now has a lot of little food stands spread all over. You can finally have something flavorful and healthy, and eat it while you’re waiting or take it on the plane.

Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert dishes on his favorite places to eat in airports around the world, Sara Clemence reports on Lunch Break.

Miami—now, Miami is pretty dysfunctional as an airport, in my experience. It’s where you have the most delays. But there’s a restaurant there, La Carreta, that is part of a local chain and is where all the stewards and pilots go. They do fantastic yucca fries, and it’s so classic Cuban Miami.

Chicago’s O’Hare is home to the Billy Goat Tavern, where they serve tasty burgers and a real breakfast—eggs, sausage, omelets. It’s only been around for about 12 years, but it feels old, like they built the terminal around it.

The place I eat in Washington, D.C., in Reagan National Airport, has one disadvantage: It’s before security. Still, I like to stop for a quick bite at Matsutake Sushi. You would normally worry about eating raw fish in an airport, but these guys do it well—and make it in front of you.

I really enjoy the Wolfgang Puck experience when I’m in Los Angeles. I admire how consistent they are—it’s really good, every time. My go-to dish is the pizza with smoked salmon and wasabi cream.

“In Singapore and Hong Kong, I go to the airport ahead of time just to eat. ”

I love stopping in Denver. On the way home from skiing, you always get delayed by snow, but there is a Mexican place called Cantina Grill that I enjoy. It’s a little bit of a dive, but they make their own guacamole. Maybe that’s why you see the pilots and flight attendants going there.

I have my favorites abroad, too. In London there’s Caviar House & Prunier. It’s nice to have something sophisticated like oysters before you get on a plane. Or you can indulge in gravlax, Champagne, vodka—they also have great Spanish ham. I guess I am a creature of habit; it helps me not to feel lost. So after Prunier I go shopping for Scotch, then I get on the plane and fall sleep.

In Singapore and Hong Kong, I go to the airport ahead of time just to eat. The food is very sophisticated in Hong Kong, and I always go back to the same place: Pak Loh Chiu Chow Restaurant. It’s tiny and modern, and serves traditional cuisine. You can even get Peking duck. Singapore’s Changi Airport goes on and on forever. On the lower level are 30 or 40 different small, small restaurants, each specializing in one thing—one does only chili crab, one does only pork cutlets. You can get 20 little tiny plates to share with friends.

When I was a kid, you went to the airport, got your ticket and went to the plane. Now flying is a big process. But I think airports are getting better, because people have realized that you have a captive audience—a bored captive audience. Everyone is getting delayed for mechanical problems, for traffic, whatever, and they need to be entertained. And fed.

—As told to Sara Clemence

Mr. Ripert is chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin in New York, the author of four cookbooks and host of the PBS television series “Avec Eric.”