… what has been lost is valuable, too, since it includes a shared heritage of literature, especially poetry, even though it was entirely the poetry of nineteenth century men.
Blog Posts about Travel
Are We Wimps?
A part of my delight in my recent trip to Yellowstone National Park in north-western Montana, was to experience real cold.
Water and a Shell: The Almost Forgotten Work of Elizabeth Eaton Burton
Wandering the lobby of the Mammoth Hotel in Yellowstone National Park last week, I came on a little fountain buried in an obscure corner.
Ten Favorites: She’s the Woman Wearing a Red Hat
Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare. These books are written slowly, sometimes painfully, and edited slowly, and also sometimes with pain, all to conform to a standard: what serious literature ought to be. But to uphold a standard that no longer means anything to most people seems an exercise in futility.
Finding What We Lost… Or Nearly.
This forgetting nearly happened to two of the cultural monuments in Spain that now seem central to the country and its history: Gaudi’s cathedral in Barcelona, and the Alhambra in Grenada.
Water… Cool, Clear Water
We seem particularly unable, here in the desert Southwest, to learn from these earlier techniques; there are no light-proof shades over the windows here in the middle of the day, no habit of closing early and opening late (which used to be the rule in the U.S. South), no planting of trees to provide crucial shade.
Queens, Kings… and Visionaries
Someone-a queen, a king, or a so-called Captain of Industry, our version-finds inspiration bursting out in bright colors in an unexpected corner: a peasant, an explorer, an architectural genius, and brings the essential power of money, wealth and prestige to force the bloom.
Homage To…
As I try to understand something about Barcelona, this anthill on the coast that seems closer to Miami than to Sevilla, I am reading George Orwell’s half-forgotten “Homage to Catalonia.”
Bulls and Flamenco
This shocks us, as we are shocked by Flamenco and the bullring. At least since the enlightenment, we of the New World have believed in our perfectibility, if not in our perfection, in our concurrent right to protection and ease. The essential tragedy of life is not for us; we will circumvent it, somehow, as when I was a small child I believed death would have been “cured” by the time I was old.
Bailouts in the Land of Duende
Today’s Spanish newspaper announces that the bailout from the European Union, a sum of money too large for me to imagine, is going to happen, although a woman I spoke with yesterday says no one knows where the money is really going-probably to the banks, as in the U.S.