I'm falling all kinds of behind with my journal right now, mostly due to school starting this week. I have two good groups of students, I think, for my two sections of Introduction To Theology. I start out with a difficult piece of reading in the "Theology as Knowledge: A Symposium" article I mentioned in my previous entry, but I think they dealt with it reasonably well.

And now I'm just dragging back in after a looong night at the Lloyds' with the gang, with Barnes and Rayna in attendance. "Around" was the theme, I think. It began with us standing around the kitchen as the food was finishing up, hearing about the last-minute move of Anna over to join Renée for her kindergarten year at the German-immersion school after the Italian-immersion school proved to be just a little too far on the crazy-crazy side. That moved over to Mexican around the patio table and the kids at their little picnic table, with everyone sliding over to be around the fire for marshmallow roasting, to a circle around the living room for a few hours after Barnes and Ray left and the kids were put down, to ending up around the fire again, with wine and cookies, me teaching Dan some guitar chords, and talk ranging from pulling up 80s/90s music videos on YouTube to long debate on whether a moderate form of Islam is really possible in the Middle East, and whether Islam is, strictly speaking, a scripturally literalist religion or whether it just claims to be. We finally surrendered as 1:30am rolled around, and the fire still going.

An awesome dinner out Wednesday night with Markus, who is already back in town from Germany. He treated me at a good Italian place in the Third Ward called Fratello's that I had never before visited. This was partially in celebration of returning to Milwaukee and Marquette, and partially in celebration of a nine-million Euro research grant he had just been awarded that, as I understand it, will be examining the chains of intellectual and spiritual "descent" and influence starting from early Protestantism, which will be directed toward the creation of a vast database devoted to the project. The grant will allow him to fund no less that 15 doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic, and so he's going to be bringing a slew of talent to Marquette on that basis alone. So that was well worth celebrating.

We actually began with drinks at the rooftop bar at the Milwaukee Athletic Club, where he is living while in Milwaukee, and I had to kick myself for not having brought my camera, as part of my mind had told me to do. The views of the city – of what the Germans call "the fourth dimension," which is appreciating a city skyline from an elevated position – were rather stunning. I had no idea from all my time "below" on the street level, that there was quite so much variation in the city, all of which grabbed my architecture-loving eye. The building across the street had a gorgeous penthouse that looked slightly castle-ish, which I had never seen. And so we talked about architecture and the similarities and differences between Markus's hometown of Hamburg and Milwaukee, among other things.

Dinner conversation was wonderful, lasting long over good food, and continuing all the way through our walk back to the MAC. We spoke an awful lot about family and relationships, as well as the inevitable business of my dissertation coming to a conclusion and the job prospects, as they're currently known, for 2010. Listening to Markus talk about coming up on (I think) his 25th anniversary with Susanna, and these years with his daughter and son coming of age ranged back and forth from interesting to moving. I heard a bit more detail of how the two of them got together, a slightly different telling of the story he shared with us all last year, and I think I was most struck by his realization that he simply wanted to continue a long night's walk and conversation with her "for the next thirty years." Good stuff.

And on the phone the other night, Grace, who just started her second grade year, charmed me to no end when, with no idea of what she was really saying, estimated that they had just paid "um, about 18 thousand dollars" for their new puppy. I had to try not to laugh out loud, and contented myself with suggesting that she not tell her friends at school that particular fact, as she might end up being expected to buy all their lunches.

Heh. I just opened an email from earlier this evening from my friend Kevin, who lives out in Jackson, Wyoming. Jackson, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is one of the most ridiculously gorgeous locations in the United States, and the wider valley under the Grand Teton Mountains – Jackson Hole – has become a favourite location for secluded houses for celebrities of various sorts. Warren Beatty idly waved to me in a "just between neighbours" sort of way out there the other year. That sort of thing. So I just got this note from Kev:

Too funny.

Just saw Harrison Ford at the cashier at Kmart ....

So it goes.

I got to spend Monday with Langers in Chicago, after some schedule-juggling. It turned out that he was having a weekend mini-reunion with his Notre Dame M.Div. classmates in Milwaukee, just as I was going to be out of town staying at my sister's. A few semi-frantic phone calls later, we figured out that I could come down to the Loop on the commuter train and meet him, as he was going to be taking the train back from Milwaukee to South Bend, where he had left his car. So, even though Mark missed his first train and arrived an hour late, he decided to stay an extra two hours in town and take the last South Shore Line train back to the Bend, giving us somewhere between four-and-a-half and five hours to spend together.

We hadn't actually seen one another since J.P.'s wedding in August of 2007, so I had my first surprise when I discovered that he had chopped off his massive pony-tail. Mark's hair has been long for almost forever. I used a shot of him and that hair for part of the interior art of Life and Other Impossibilities back in 2004. When I met Mark at Notre Dame in December 1994, he had that sort of medieval-ish "bowl" haircut one sees occasionally. This was even shorter. This hearkened back to a Mark I'd only heard about: the football player Mark, back in Pittsburg. I had seen this Mark only once: on a videotape of the Freeks on their world tour, eyes closed and dancing the midst of a village in India, oblivious to the perplexed stares of the villagers standing around watching him. I'd never met a Mark who looked like this before. It was that big a deal. He bust out laughing, being in truth the same Mark, as soon as he saw my face, and told me that he had been hiding the fact that he cut his hair (for job interviews over a year ago) in our phone conversations, just so that he could see that look on my face.

We walked down Madison Avenue toward Millennium Park, as the panhandlers around the bridge over the Chicago River provoked Mark into recalling the outrageously persistent panhandler who stalked us while we were having dinner outside at the Water Street Brewery, when Mark visited me in Milwaukee in July 2003. We got to talking a bit about what little we knew and liked of Chicago architecture, with me talking about how much had been lost or destroyed, as I had learned about in reading in Lost Chicago. This conversation featured great visual aids as we walked by the classic Chicago Building, the elegant base curves of the Chase Tower (which reminds me of the fictional S.T.A.R. Labs), and this afternoon in particular, we were both struck by the façade of St. Peter's Church as we came up under it. Mark noted approvingly that it was run by the Franciscans, and we ducked in briefly to see the interior as people were coming out from a weekday Mass. That sort of thing got us talking Ecclesiology for a brief but intense stretch, as I quickly outlined for him where my dissertation research had taken me. In the time that I've known him, Mark has grown into an able theological thinker, and I was gratified to hear him respond as strongly as he did to what I was doing.

Arriving at Millennium Park itself, I was curious to have a look-around. I had never actually been there, despite having been downtown on any number of occasions since the Park was completed about five years ago. We walked in straight to the Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion, where some percussionists were soundchecking, and I marveled at the sound quality from where we ended up standing, out in the center of the law. Mark was equally marveling when I tolk him that our mutual Notre Dame friend Jeanine was playing there during the summers with the Grant Park Symphony – information which had somehow eluded him. So we fondly talked about her – our co-conspirator back in April 1997 for "The Francis Sessions" – and what she had accomplished musically. Had we more time, we would have immediately tried to track her down or summon her.

We eyeballed Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, like all good tourists, as we sat down in the plaza for a while, and so that Mark could scarf down a few hot dogs. This actually got us going in earnest for a bit on public art. The sculpture's ability to pull in a vision of much of the city (as well as the viewers) in its outer, convex surface really emphasized the nature of the piece as public art: as commentary on the city itself, or at least as pointing toward the city. The fact that it does so without metaphor or abstraction, but simply reflects the city itself, makes its functioning as public art perhaps as simple and direct as such a piece could theoretically be: all you see in it is the very city that you see all around you at that moment. This got us onto questions of Post-Modernity in art. I was initially dazzled when I was introduced in college to the idea of approaching a text not as a piece representing purely the author's intent, but with whatever you as the reader brought to it, to recognize that there is no single restraining, authoritarian narrative, but that a fabulous variety of narratives can be discovered in any piece. This excitement of mine lasted about five minutes. As with a lot of ideas, it has its point, but that if you absolutize it, it pretty much consumes all other possibilities. (Becoming a single restraining, authoritarian narrative, as it were.) I realized that this kind of perspectivism – of refusing even the possibility of narratives or meanings that transcend ourselves – had nowhere to go, although that ride to nowhere might seem fun in its capacity for self-indulgence. At the time, as an undergraduate, I just instinctively realized that I already knew everything that I already knew: what I was interested in was art that actually challenged me with some possibility, some insight into truths which I had not yet perceived. Art, physics, philosophy: all of them were only worthwhile if that possibility was out there. So, looking at Cloud Gate with Mark, I raised the possibility that perhaps it sucked as public art: was it just looking into a mirror? Was it perhaps the ultimate artistic, postmodern joke: that everyone looking at Cloud Gate simply, and literally, "saw what they wanted to see?" Possibly, but I opted away from quite such a cynical stance: the visual of the sculpture still was concrete and specific, even if it was grand in scale – it was still the city and the community, with one's self inevitably and necessarily in the midst of it.

We retired over to a Michigan Avenue coffeehouse for some liquid fuel for Mark and for a switch into chairs, people-watching with great pleasure and talking about the current states of our lives. I got to hear more (and to see his facial expressiveness, which I don't get in our occasional long phone calls) about his relationship with Shannon, his decision to put to rest his full-time musical work so that he could pursue that relationship, and his return to teaching Theology. He spoke of her artistic career, and her move from an internationally-prominent career to one more regional and settled, and happy to set outside of the New York-London gallery hustle. I talked about my vision of my time in Milwaukee, now that I am beginning to have a vision of it as a whole, seeing it as a distinct period in my life as it moves toward its close. When we got up again to walk back across the street and continue our stroll through the park, I got a bit of a surprise. Standing on the corner of Michigan and Washington, I was saying something to Mark when, somehow, in the midst of all the sound of the city, I thought I heard faintly behind me, "...ster Novak?" I turned around and hey! presto! There was Bryan Haney, bearded and years older than when I had last seen him, when he was a student of mine in Saint Joe's class of 2003. So we exchanged a bit of news, and he said something absurdly complimentary about my teaching. He talked about his work as a videographer and editor briefly, and I was so stunned by the randomness of it all that I completely forgot to ask about Long Distance Affair, his band whose gig invitations I've had to turn down for years because of, well, long distance. So a few stunned moments of lame conversation on my part later, Bryan merged back into the crowd, leaving Mark laughing at me for how easily I could be surprised.

We went strolling through the middle of The Taste of Chicago, and ended up in the neighbourhood of Buckingham Fountain, where we continued the conversation along the previous lines for about an hour, first looking at the Fountain itself, which had been barricaded off the last time we had each been in Grant Park, and then later over on the plaza stairs looking out over Lake Michigan. At that point I guided Mark over to the South Shore station, and we spent the last half-hour talking on those old wooden benches, which always give me an old-time train station feel whenever I see them. We found ourselves both pleased to note the wonderful gift we've found about these Notre Dame friendship: that in them we experience no loss of trust, intimacy or even familiarity, despite the gaps in time between our actual gatherings or encounters. I've had less occasion to see Mark than I have Erik, for example, but we can pick up just as we left off, and that's a treasure in this world.

At the Palmer House in Chicago, lounging in their grand lobby where I only have to pay $7 for an hour of wireless rather than $15 for an hour of cable internet access in my room. (I was here my first year at Marquette, I think, when I got tix to Simon and Garfunkel's tour, and Kev, Stevie and Erin and I all met here in town, for drinks at the Signature Room, dinner at some cool old local place Steve knew, and then ice cream at Water Tower before the show. A great night.) And I wanted to check for any last-minute contact from any of my applications. The interview system here at the AAR is chaos: completely confusing. Half internet dating, half speed dating, half passing notes in class. My "Jobs Center" orientation tonight, for which I came down and paid for my Friday night's stay, consisted of getting a packet and no orientation meeting. Charming. I don't know quite what to do for the schools for which I have applications out and haven't been turned down (I've been declined for interviews by two schools so far). Some of the schools I'm waiting on are listed as "open" interviews, meaning I fill out a card that gets passed to them and the assign me a slot, or not. There's lots of schools that haven't said "yes" or "no" to me, officially, but have been gleefully sending me more paperwork – mostly affirmative action information requests. So I'm not sure if I'm supposed to put in interview requests for them (other than the few that explicitly stated that theirs would be the "open"-style interviews) or whether this would be tacky and harrassing of me. Of course, in the end, I can't risk making any mistake of simple omission, so tacky and harrassing interview requests it is! So it looks like I'll be hanging in the interview lounge and missing most of the conference proper.

I've talked to a few guys from Marquette who did some interviewing last year. Apparently the fact that I have three confirmed interviews going in is really good, especially given that I'm still writing. Yikes. And yikes to the bare-chested Roman soldier who just passed me! Halloween in the Loop.... It's a warm, wonderful night here, and I went walking in Grant Park a bit ago with Matthew G. from my program, taking in the classic Chicago skyline. I always loved the "sliced-away" building: you know, the one that was in Adventures in Babysitting? (If I remember correctly....) Then I enjoyed seeing the lions at the Art Institute again for the first time in a long while, a bit of Lorado Taft, and the costumes of the people going up and down Michigan Avenue. Again, a great night to be in Chicago. Yowza! The biker-dominatrix who just walked by was a bit ... flamboyant, even for the rest of what the city has conjured up tonight.

The best part of the Jobs Center tonight was running into Kari-Shane, my best friend from my first few years at Marquette, before she landed a job at St. Ben's/St. John's in Collegeville, MN, beating out a hundred people with Ph.D.s in hand before she had even turned in her dissertation proposal. She's tenure-track there, and here to interview candidates for their Theology and Gender position.

Mmm... Bailey's on the rocks. So Chicago. So Irish-American. So yummy.

Anyway, they don't seem to have people down here interviewing candidates for the Theology and Spirituality position I applied for, and she knows nothing of that search, but thinks it would be supergroovy if I could end up up there, teaching with her. So

Crap! A $14 Bailey's?! Palmer House.... I 'll make a point of staring at the scenery a bit more while drinking it, so as to try to convince myself how high-end this all is.

So... she joined me down at some faux pub in the Hilton where the American Academy of Religion conference is being held and we caught up while I grabbed some Fish n Chips: me telling her about the dissertation, which she made cool, excited noises over, at least letting me think that mine is a cool idea. She told me the horror story of her mis-medicated, 21 hour labor to end up giving birth to Sarah via C-section last year. And other tidbits of motherhood. Running into lots of other old faces in passing: Michelle from a summer at Notre Dame, Rhodora from Mark's M.Div. class. I struck up a fun conversation trying to figure out how to sign in with a University of Chicago prof on the way over to the Hilton and once we got inside.

A funny thing happened on the way to the ... conference. In my uncomfortable dress shoes, I decided to hop the shuttle over from the Palmer House to the Hilton, saving me a nine-block walk. We got a few blocks, then stopped. Then the bus driver laughed... and walked off the bus. When he came back on, we finally noticed the faint reflection of flashing lights behind us. The bus got pulled over – a big, regular bus, like one you'd take on the interstate. The driver got pulled over because he had clipped off a side mirror on a car. And the cops saw. Because it was the police car he clipped. After a few minutes, we realized we all were going to get to the conference faster if we just walked the remaining seven blocks. And, like I said, it was great outside. And, of course, I was in a rush to make it to my orientation....

So, so far, so good.

Continued From Below

On Saturday, Chad and I ended up talking books a great deal over breakfast, particularly about a Western culture text assessing shifts over the last half-millennium by Jacques Barzun entitled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present. He took me through some of the thesis of that while I dutifully added it to my mental "must buy and someday read" list. A little while later I was floored when I looked through one of Chad's architectural books, this one called Lost Chicago by David Garrard Lowe, which showed me the gems of Chicago that both had been lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and also that had been built and senselessly destroyed within a few decades to make room for a newer idea. In particular, I got my first glimpse at photographs of what had been standing in Chicago during the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, which I couldn't believe had been torn down. I had mentioned this in my conversation with him the night before: about having been told of the great classical architecture put up along the lakefront, of which (I had been told) the only remnants were the Field Museum and the Science and Industry Museum, and that all the land in-between and been filled with such classical treasures. This wasn't entirely accurate, I now discovered (the survivors are now in fact the Science and Industry Museum and the Art Institute), but I could see why the friend who had told me the story had also mentioned that a friend of his, a scuba diver, said that if you went diving off the coast of the city, where the rubble from the demolished pavilions had been dumped, it looked the ruins of Atlantis. How accurate that is, I'm no longer sure, having had Chad tell me and the book confirm that most of the buildings were not intended to be permanent and were not build of the marble they appear to be, but rather of a stucco of some sort. Plans to finish them in marble later were abandoned when much of the pavilions burned in a fire in 1894. So, anyway, I had to grab Chad and gabble about the photographs and the book with him for a few minutes. And then add that one, too, to the must-buy list. This also proved the occasion for Chad to enthuse about a book called The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson, which I had not heard of, but which sounded great fun. I sat down and strained my brain for a bit to come up with a list of books Chad might like as gifts, which made me remember us talking about books the same way years ago, with me pushing Julian of Norwich upon them with great gusto, and their questions about the types of things I was reading inspiring me (on top of a run of similar requests) to start keeping an ongoing Reading List on my old website. I suppose you'd have to go back through the journal here, and add up all the books tags to get the same thing, though that sounds like an awful lot of work.

Saturday afternoon the whole family headed over to the Lakeview Museum of Arts & Science, to take the kids to an appropriately kid-titled exhibition called "Grossology: The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body" which was a wonderland of cartoonish displays of digestion, burping, mucus and zits. This was in addition to the hands-on and fun science of their Discovery Center. I was a bit more interested, along with Chad, in a display called "Within the Emperor's Garden: The Ten Thousand Springs Pavilion," which I tried and failed to photograph surreptitiously from my hip, under the suspicious stare of the little old lady who had told me that photographs were not allowed. The model of the Pavilion from the Forbidden City was interesting in its own right, but what especially captured my interest was the diagram and side display of how the fitted wood beams of their architecture allowed for such ornate and grand construction without the use of any sort of nails. I suggested to Chad that, in lieu of turning his yard into an English-style garden, he might at least construct a gazebo in their backyard on these principles. But when I mentioned that alone putting their home on the local tourist route, I could suddenly see why that might be unattractive.

On the way over to the Museum, Chad had taken me on a roundabout route through Peoria, past a contract his company was working on for a new ministry center for the Diocese (now headed by Bishop Dan Jenkins, who had been the Rector at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart during most of my time at Notre Dame and with the Folk Choir), through the West Bluff Historic District down West Moss Avenue, an older neighbourhood of wonderfully-restored or -maintained homes of interest, including a pair of Wright or student-of-Wright designs that were as tasteful as ever. Older homes under the shade of older trees. Just the way everyone should be able to live. From the Museum, Chad took me on a route that let me eyeball the magnificent homes on Grandview Drive, which I'd seen one night when Darcie Short drove some of us from LOMC around the sites of Peoria. Here on the high bluff above the Illinois River, I was particularly taken with some of the 1930s-style manors which you could easily imagine Cary Grant stepping out from in old Beverly Hills grandeur. Chad told the kids and me stories of taking drives along here with with mother on Sundays after church as a kid, zooming down the hairpin turns. We ended up near the equally-interesting look of the old Peoria Water Works Company down by the river before Eva hit her maximum tolerance of Dad's architectural enthusiasm and lecture, and I thanked Chad contentedly as we raced home before the looming four year-old meltdown.

Angie and Chad wanted to have an adults-only dinner with me (or at least used my presence as an excuse for an adults-only dinner, themselves) and they took me out to a very cool Italian restaurant down near the waterfront district of Peoria called Rizzi's on State that I liked a lot, and hope to return to someday. There I tackled their Pork Chops Siciliana (Thick cut pork chops sautéed with mushrooms, cherry peppers and onions with a touch of marinara.) with a glass of a Chianti whose name escapes me now, and which Chad tried as well. This is where I discovered, as we talked a bit of wine, that Angie – who, when I first had gotten to be friends with her, had been a teetotaler like me, out of caution – had since discovered that alcohol tended to make her quiet, if not sullen, of all things, whereas for me it makes me more lighthearted, talkative and giggly. ("As if you need that," said Dan to me when I told him this story.)

A block behind us, a photographer was shooting a bride and her party against the background of one of the old brick factories of the Peoria waterfront, and we talked about how that sort of visual juxtaposition had become fashionable lately, while I mentioned beyondthewell and wondered if it was her and her husband taking the shots. I suppressed the urge to go over and find out, though I thought it would be funny to just trip by and surprise her, if so. Their studio is just over in Bloomington, and after describing their business, we then got to talking about paying for serious portraiture and for art in general, and what that was worth to us. Karen herself had written to me about her and Nate taking up Over The Rhine favourite Michael Wilson's availability to do his "Daylight Portrait", and that had gotten me thinking about the value of such things, particularly given that I have an irrational impulse in my head that denies that there could possibly be anything in this world – houses, cars, books – that one ought to pay more than, say, twenty dollars for. [And instantly, Angie's recent citation jumps into my head: From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put. – Sir Winston Churchill]

I asked them a theoretical question about their sense of contemporary attitudes in Evangelicalism on the question of "certainty" in faith that they completely shot down, though I suppose that it might have more to do with my specific observations of Evangelicals who convert to Catholicism than with Evangelicalism in general. But I abandoned that tack of making them speak for all of Evangelicalism in America before I became utterly annoying.


We went walking then, after dinner, along the restored and lively waterfront, which seemed shockingly different from the Rust Belt ruin I remember from college days. It was a delight to see something have come to life again like that. I looked at this piece of now-fading painting along one of an old series of railway supports, from a line that once crossed the river here to descend into the city. We people-watched the other strollers, talked about weird Asian fish that had been disastrously transplanted into the Illinois River, wondered about a WWII submarine memorial that apparently stood there for no reason other than these subs having passed through Peoria, eyed the Segway rentals, listened to a bit of what sounded like a Dead cover-band, and talked.


I tried taking a decent portrait shot of them, which Chad was too amused to take seriously, flashing me a maniacal Joker smile when I tried. Angie had told me that they had shown the girls the shots I had taken when I'd last visited, before the girls had come along, which the girls found quite funny, perhaps because of Angie's unusually short haircut from the time. Myself, I was still having trouble getting used to Chad's short and business-like hair today, as he had then expressed his own preference for wearing his longer, and had wondered, if I recall correctly, whether he could get away with letting it grow even longer than it was then.


As we left the waterfront, I had Chad take me a bit further down the district so that we could go up the climb on Persimmon Street where I then told (or for Angie, re-told) the story of my grand misadventure the night of Darcie's wedding, with her Maid of Honour December Saucedo, Rich Alms, and Todd Peterson. The run back up to the downtown area is no longer the gauntlet of crackhouses, shooting ranges, brothels and clubs disguised as the above (and a police precinct squatting innocently in their midst) that it used to be. Chad regaled us with similar memories of sitting with his Dad in the window of the old brick place where he worked, eating sandwiches and watching police raids like they were quality entertainment.

Back at the house, with the babysitter returned to her family (and after a talk on the virtues of jr. high school girls versus high school girls for babysitting), we three just kicked back and talked the rest of the night. Angie was now having a Mike's Hard Lemonade, which managed not to cause the withdrawn effect we had discussed earlier, and perhaps aided in the talk. A bit more architecture. A long conversation on dreams, particularly dreams of flying, with the discovery that Chad and I experienced dreams of flying in exactly the same way, giving rise to my curiosity as to whether this would be a more common male trait, if we could survey the question broadly. For us, flight in our dreams takes an absolutely stillness of mind, a state of perfect confidence or faith in one's ability to fly, any wavering of which becomes a wavering of flight itself, with the threat of disaster. Furthermore, we discovered that we never remember launching into flight in our dreams: we always enter a flight dream in the midst of flying. Angie, on the other hand, described an actual "take off" process in her flight dreams of running down the street with arms stretched out, airplane-style, which had Chad and I howling at the image, to Angie's mild annoyance.

The next day, I simply got ready after waking and headed out to the Bloomington Amtrak station with Angie. We were listening to the soundtrack from Elizabethtown in the car as we began talking, and memories of the movie struck a certain chord with me at that moment. The film had come up during a long train of our Friday night conversation about movies. Waiting for Chad, I was tempted to foist a digital download of Before Sunrise on her when I found out that she had never seen the film, and I talked about why Linklater's Before Sunrise/Before Sunset duology had had such an impact on me over the last few years, acknowledging that I might have to push my other top favourites (Never Cry Wolf, A Man For All Seasons, The Man Without A Face) aside for them. She had given me a long list of favourite films, most of which I had never even heard of, which was kind of interesting in itself, to find that her taste had gotten so broad and independent-oriented. But Elizabethtown had popped up in the talk, one of the few mainstream movies to do so on her part, which I had just seen for the first time maybe a month or two earlier, and that got me thinking. I thought it was a flawed film (we both pointed to things like Susan Sarandon's dance sequence), but it somehow felt stronger to me for the flaws, if that makes any sense. While certainly the small town feel appealed to me given my roots, I think it was the theme of remaining open to the unexpected turns ahead of us in life that had struck me most strongly, and certainly that kind of openness was something for which Angie was ready to take me to task, as I had described the last few years to her. And so the parallels between themes in the film and themes in the weekend's conversations suddenly appeared in my mind as we set out on the highway to the road-trip music of the soundtrack. Go figure. She had time to get me to the train station and return easily before meeting Chad and the girls at church, and now the talk was pretty light, of odds and ends, and the occasional thought about this chance to catch up as a whole.

We sat there on the cement slab that serves as the "platform" of Bloomington's train station. We talked occasionally about this and that, but mostly I just found myself looking at her, mostly in a kind of quiet amusement and wonder that she was there. Or that I was there. I remembered the day I met her, noticing her red car pulling onto the gravel road leading back to LOMC after mine, a few days before training started, just after the end of the school year, and being introduced to her as one of the Coordinators for that summer. Along with discovering that she was one of my bosses, there was a bit of recognition that there was something about her that I already liked. Now, sitting on the ground this summer morning, I knew that maybe I was being a bit sentimental: it's a job hazard for me as an historian, paying as much attention as I try to to the past. "Did you ever think that we would still be friends after all this time?" I asked her, shortly before we realized it was already ten and that my train had not yet showed up. I continued thinking along these lines after we said goodbye, and while I sat the extra 40-odd minutes for the train to arrive. So many of these other rich, rich friendships from that amazing summer had blurred and faded with distance, but here we were, still talking as intensely and as curiously after all this time, as much as we ever had, late after the campers had gone to bed, sitting out on the Meadows' Deck, underneath the stars. Like everyone else who has ever lived before us, we had laughed about how it really does seem like just a year or two ago. That we would still be friends might be beyond expectations, but that certainly didn't matter: just the fact that it still seemed perfectly natural to be friends was the only thing that counted. Even though it was my own, there was a sense of realizing that I didn't know that the story would be this good.

With the train about 45 minutes late, I still ended up only missing my connection to Milwaukee at Union Station by two minutes. Declining to take part in the mild riot brewing by those who wanted those last two minutes to run down the track to the nigh-departing train, I took the opportunity to withdraw, grab some food, and go sit on a bench looking out across the water at the city, just a bit south of the Adams Street Bridge. I wished I had Chad handy as my personal architecture enthusiast as I looked at the different buildings, and I mused on the last week, at seeing and catching up with Jenny and Angie within a few days, thinking that I only lacked Sunshine strolling down the riverwalk with her husband to round out the sequence nicely. If anything, the last few weeks had both indicated that there was something in my life that was so much bigger than me, if that makes any sense: a sense of symmetry or narrative structure that didn't seem a conscious creation of my own, but also not quite something I'd want to give the grade school theology tag of God "writing my story:" I do believe that God gives us and our universe too much freedom for such a deterministic understanding of events, and yet... there was a kind of grace going on. Perhaps it really means that I've frequently done things right. I hoped so. I hoped that I've really been given a gift for friendship and for love that I've succeeded in using, and in healing where I've putzed it up. Whatever exactly it all is or was, as I sat there with just the two of us – me and Chicago – it seemed to give my presence in space and time a bit of meaning that defied the obvious fact that I was barely in this city long enough to cast an afternoon shadow. And though there were so many things that told me not to be – right then, I was content with that.

I had a quietly fabulous time with Jules Monday night. The scheduled Event of the evening was to watch Before Sunset together. I had bought that DVD and my copy of Before Sunrise with her back in December of 2006, and sweat through the break in not watching them on my own, to save the experience for her. I had seen them a few years earlier, and then had rented and watched them again in November and absolutely been floored by them in a way I hadn't been before. But for one reason or another, whenever Julie and I hung out, we were doing something else. So I didn't get a chance to watch Before Sunrise with her until a few months ago, and Before Sunset finally happened last night.

When I got over to their place, though, she and Jackie were in the midst of their stare-at-the-accident fascination with The Bachelorette, and so things had to be postponed for an hour while they filled me in on that piece of reality TV nonsense, which has long been their personal cocaine. So that had us laughing and talking bizarre dating dynamics, while Julie caught me up on her news here and there. We took some time there, as she filled me in on some things she wanted to talk with me about, and it proved, in a way, to be an interesting jumping-off point to the film: to move from real couple dynamics to a well-done fictional one in a kind of extreme setting, but then to use the fictional narrative to come back to the real one later in the night. She's been around the Theatre program enough that she's one of my favourite people to watch anything with, and she was technically taken with the film right away, marveling at how tight the narrative was, which was gratifying. I was surprised to have her say that she thought she preferred the second one: I wouldn't have been surprised to hear that after further viewings, but Before Sunrise is such a charmer of a masterpiece that it can leave the more complicated Before Sunset to seem less attractive by comparison, at least at first, I suspect. But I think the realism of that complexity appealed to her, though she felt ambiguous about some of the character flaws revealed in that complexity, like the question of fidelity raised by Jesse and Celine's situation.

So we worked our way through the Chianti and through some talk on the logic of fidelity, of what the human mind or spirit needs in that commitment. We didn't actually tie it into her upcoming research as she starts her Psychology Ph.D. at Stony Brook, but now as I'm typing this up, it strikes me that that might make for an interesting project in light of her focus on cognition itself. Playing the part of a theologian, that made me talk about what seemed to me to be the pure functionality of classic Christian sexual ethics, that they were not taboo-based but based on a pretty common-sense, observational reaction ingrained human psychological drives, although probably articulated in terms of "natural law" theory, but ultimately meaning the same thing. As usual, the conversation seemed to be just getting really going when I had to duck out if I was going to catch the last bus before the city system shut down at 2am.

My social streak continued last night, then, when I got together with Diane for dinner. She jumped at the chance to picnic, since she and Tim don't really get the chance with their conflicting work hours. So we went over to Metro Market and walked around the produce and deli sections, putting together a few salady things for her, and grabbing some bread and fruit and fried chicken for me. We decided to forego wine and to instead grab local soda: her pouncing on a Sprecher's Kola and me, when I inexplicably found no non-diet Sprecher's Root Beer available, grabbing a Point Root Beer instead, which I'd been meaning to try, anyway, and which proved to be well above average in quality.

We left the car parked there, after she showed me how her recent car accident in the nearby intersection went down, and we strolled over to Lake Michigan, grabbing a picnic table over by the Solomon Juneau statue where we had a great view of the sailboats playing in the light of the setting sun. Seeing those, I instantly regretted not having my camera. Amid lots of purely fun talk and laughing, it was really cool to hear something of how she's getting a sense of growing as a writer through her writing job for Discovery World, and how even what would seem to be straightforward factual or scientific writing could give her a chance to engage in unexpected creative exercises, such as her assignment to describe all the species of fish in a particular display as though she was writing wine reviews. Watching the sailboats made me recall the fun of learning to sail and windsurf with Richard Grainger in the Sailing I camp my first year at LOMC, and the thrill of getting away from the kids during our break and racing Sunfish against one another, standing off the gunwale with backs arched out over the water, straining to keep the boats running as fast before the wind as we could without the sails flipping us over. Diane and I both thought that it would be fabulous to go out on Discovery World's schooner, which neither of us had done, and she told a funny story of waiting for a particular appointment on day, and running into a strapping, gorgeous guy who she (brightly) asked if he was the person she was expecting, only to find out, in his rich English accent that, no, he was the chef on board the schooner, leaving her thinking "Of course you are!" and laughing about this vision of all the mancandy staffing the sailing vessel that she never got to go near in her work at the place.

As we finished the last of our food, we strolled down Juneau Park to the older, upper part of the Art Museum, to see if we could get out on the deck overlooking the water, which I had only really noticed for the first time from the picnic table. That was locked down, and we debated whether it was worth climbing the fence and getting caught now, or whether to save that for a different time. We went back around the front, peered in through the window at a model of a PT boat, so then I gave a brief history of PT 109, which I assumed it was, and privately marveled at how my fourth grade war histories were still floating around in my head. We settled onto a spot where we overlooked the Calatrava addition to the Musuem, leaning on the top of a wall, Peanuts-style, and Diane asked about some of what the looming application process looked like, after I had told her about getting a feeler for a systematic theology position from Pittsburg's Duquesne University, which I was kind of theo-geekily delighted to see was actually named Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit, who I happen to find very cool. So, moving eventually to sit at the foot of the Lincoln statue, I tried to make sense of that process, as well as marveling in general the simple fact that it's coming, while we also talked here-and-there of the architecture that we liked as we looked northward across the park at the old Cudahy Building and the new high-rises in the neighbourhood. The older buildings, with their penthouses six or eight stories above the street were the ones that caught my eye more, though we also laughed about the idea of dressing up and posing as through we were thinking of buying one of the new condos, "modestly priced between $649,000 and $2,499,000," just so that we could get in and eyeball them.

Diane led me down Kilbourn a few blocks and then turned down to a cute, quiet place I'd never noticed before on Cass and Wells called Buckley's Kiskeam Inn, we finished up the night sitting out at the sidewalk table with a pomegranate martini for her and a Syrah for me, just talking over our current events, and looking back over the last year at how much had changed over that time. Good times. Tonight, by contrast, I think will be largely devoted to laundry.

Another waking in the middle of the night. (Heh. Just found your note. Thanks, Em.) Took a few hours out to finally catch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this past evening with Mike and Donna, over at the glamourous Oriental Theatre, though not, unfortunately, in the main theatre, as it would have been if I'd seen it in the first week or so. That was just pure popcorn fun, as expected, with Spielberg enjoying himself playing with all sorts of 1950s cultural motifs.

Pulled down my copy of Jordan's A Crown of Swords for fun reading during meals, sleepless interludes, and such. My copy of Lord of Chaos is now fallen into three large chunks still hanging together in its hardcover: the rush to printing always made me feel that these were not the best-bound books in the world. But this read-through has had a bit of a nostalgic feel to me. I always remember reading the first blazing sentence of Lord of Chaos from my brother Joe's new copy, sitting cross-legged on a table in a hallway waiting on him while he was in his Portuguese class at the U of I, coincidentally as a classmate of one of my favourite L.O.M.C. campers, Dana Ingman. A Crown of Swords was the first volume of The Wheel of Time that I'd made a point of buying on the day of release, and the first one to make promotional use of that newfangled "internet," posting the Prologue for free on Tor Book's webpage, before they figured out how to charge for that, too. Reading the prologue always makes me remember walking up to Holy Cross House on a sunny day, reading a copy of the Prologue I'd printed out at the library, and of handing it around to Brett Boessen and Kate Keating, sharing the excitement of the coming story with them. I can't think of many books that have so many memories attached to the reading of it in this way, but it certainly reinforces the fact that it's fun to find friends who share our fandoms.

Miscellanea from the web that I wanted to jot down in my journal: Two news stories about Tim Russert's funeral,

Political leaders pay tribute to TV's Russert
Obama, McCain among mourners at Washington funeral Mass for Russert

and an interesting cultural essay that caught my eye reposted in crookedfingers' journal:

1958: The War of the Intellectuals
By RACHEL DONADIO

( Read more... )

How amazing is it, that there is still something new of the Master's to discover? I never get to find things like this tucked into my things! That said, I'm turning in: I've been up working for 32 hours and I've earned my rest.

Vatican: Michelangelo Sketch Found
Dec 6, 3:52 PM (ET)

By FRANCES D'EMILIO

VATICAN CITY (AP) - A long-missing Michelangelo sketch for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, possibly his last design before his death, has been discovered in the basilica's offices, the Vatican newspaper said Thursday.

The sketch, drawn in blood-red chalk for stonecutters who were working on the construction of the basilica, was done by the Renaissance master in the spring of 1563, less than a year before his death, L'Osservatore Romano reported.

"The sureness in his stroke, the expert hand used to making decisions in front of unfinished stone, leave little doubt, the sketch is Michelangelo's," the newspaper wrote about the discovery, which it said will be presented at a news conference at the Vatican on Monday.

The sketch shows that Michelangelo "on the threshold of 90 years of age, even though he wasn't coming regularly to the (basilica) construction site, continued to take binding decisions" on how the work was being carried out, the Holy See's official newspaper commented.

The sketch "now becomes the last known design of the artist," the newspaper said.

Michelangelo, who began working on the basilica's construction in 1547, was in his late 80s when he did the sketch. The sketch is especially rare, the Vatican newspaper noted, because the artist ordered many of his designs destroyed when he was an old man.

The sketch was discovered in the Fabbrica of St. Peter's, which contains the basilica's offices.

L'Osservatore Roman said most sketches done by Michelangelo for the stonecutters were destroyed or lost in the cutters' workplaces, but this one survived because a supervisor used the back of the sketch to make notes about problems linked to the stone's transport through the outskirts of Rome.

Assistance in the research for the sketch came from the University of Bonn and Rome's Bibliotheca Hertziana.

Michelangelo apparently drew the sketch for the stonecutters because he was dissatisfied with how with some blocks of travertine were cut, the newspaper said.

Travertine is a particularly resistant stone still used today in building homes and offices in Rome.

Michelangelo's design shows a spur of the drum of the dome to indicate to the cutters just how much stone needed to be hewn. Included on the sketch were three numbers - "6, 9 and 3/4" - but it was not clear what the figures referred to.

Michelangelo completed the dome and four columns for its base before he died in February 1564. Three weeks before he died, when he was nearly 89, Michelangelo went up the dome to inspect it.

The construction of the basilica, whose cupola defines Rome's skyline, spanned several working lifetimes of some of the Renaissance's most celebrated artists and architects.

The first architect of the basilica, Donato Bramante, died eight years after the cornerstone was laid. Other architects, including Raphael, followed, until Pope Paul III turned to Michelangelo in 1546 - 32 years after the artist had put the last brush stroke on the Sistine Chapel's frescoed ceiling.

Sanctuary of Rome's 'Founder' Revealed
Nov 20, 8:03 PM (ET)

By ARIEL DAVID

ROME (AP) - Archaeologists on Tuesday unveiled an underground grotto believed to have been revered by ancient Romans as the place where a wolf nursed the city's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.

Decorated with seashells and colored marble, the vaulted sanctuary is buried 52 feet inside the Palatine hill, the palatial center of power in imperial Rome, the archaeologists said at a news conference.

In the past two years, experts have been probing the space with endoscopes and laser scanners, fearing that the fragile grotto, already partially caved-in, would not survive a full-scale dig, said Giorgio Croci, an engineer who worked on the site.

The archaeologists are convinced that they have found the place of worship where Romans believed a she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of the god of war Mars who were abandoned in a basket and left adrift on the Tiber.

Thanks to the wolf, a symbol of Rome to this day, the twins survived, and Romulus founded the city, becoming its first king after killing Remus in a power struggle.

Ancient texts say the grotto known as the "Lupercale"- from "lupa," Latin for she-wolf - was near the palace of Augustus, Rome's first emperor, who was said to have restored it, and was decorated with a white eagle.

That symbol of the Roman Empire was found atop the sanctuary's vault, which lies just below the ruins of the palace built by Augustus, said Irene Iacopi, the archaeologist in charge of the Palatine and the nearby Roman Forum.

Augustus, who ruled from the late 1st century B.C. to his death in the year 14, was keen on being close to the places of Rome's mythical foundation and used the city's religious traditions to bolster his hold on power, Iacopi said.

( Read more... )

Mike and Donna bought a place last year, a Milwaukee Bungalow in the Riverwest neighbourhood, that needed lots of work done on it in order to convert it from duplex to the single-family home that they wanted. Now, when I think of "fixing up" a place I move into, I'm thinking painting and maybe some very basic wood surface work. Mike, like Dan, has instead taken to tearing down walls, building new rooms and the like. They've raised and leveled the first floor over the last year, and yesterday, in prelude to tearing down a wall for the new kitchen-dining space that's coming, Mike, Donna, Dan, and I put up a 12-foot beam that will support the second floor in lieu of the soon-to-be-absent wall. Mike and Dan, naturally, did the bulk of the heavy lifting, which is the type of thing I'm not supposed to do after my adventures with steroids, and Donna and I swapped off on watching the kids. But I did lend a third set of hands in getting the thing into the room and in figuring out how to turn it so that it actually could get into the position intended: no mean trick given that the beam was longer than the room itself. Mike's losing a lot of study time to the project, but he and Donna should walk away from their time in Milwaukee with a profit on their living expenses, and I can't knock that. We had a dinner together of yummy homemade waffles with bacon, an unending stream of chatter from Renée, and odd moments of sound and expression from Zeke and Owen (Amy being off in NYC and NJ with Anna).

Friday night was Gallery Night in the Third Ward, and it was way bigger than I expected. Just the thing for a fun night out, if you could stand the crowds. I wandered a bit, but made my way before too long down to Artasia where I was meeting Diane prior to us watching Before Sunrise, which I've wanted her to check out for quite awhile. In fact, this was the third time in two weeks we'd made plans to see it, but things kept coming up, like the tragic collapse of her friend Robin last week. It turned out that the third time wasn't the charm here, either, as I thought she was getting off work around 8pm and it turned out she was going more toward midnight. I hung around the incredibly crowded shop, and look at some gift ideas, while getting the full tour of the wares from Diane, as well as meeting some of her coworkers that I'd long heard of, but never met. In time, her brother Dan showed up and between those two, and a pair of customers that I got into a long conversation with over wine, the night ended up being a blast. After running a car-shuffling errand, it was really too late to try to get the flick in, and so we grabbed a late dinner at Ma Fischer's, which I thought just the right way to end the night, being my favourite dive in town. As usual, the soup tasted incredible (New England Clam Chowder) and the potatoes remained the most disgusting instant sort. As, always, we had some great conversation that left me with a lot to think about.

I'm finally finishing a draft of a specific chapter after two months of just raw, unorganized writing on the dissertation. Now I'm stripping away things that I can save for later chapters and just seeing what I need for the biographical essay on Francis Sullivan. It's interesting to see it coming together, like I'm stepping back from a wall I've been building stone by stone, and can now start to see more of the whole. I'm not doing lots of free reading these days, other than the basket of books, magazines and catalogues I keep in the bathroom. I knocked off David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day at Julie's recommendation, which I thought got better as it went along, more pure wit and less snarkiness. I've been working for months on The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, and will likely take many more months to complete the three-volume set, the third volume of which I've yet to pick up. I confess that I love reading people's mail. Whether the earlier Letters of C. S. Lewis the letters of Augustine, or the Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo that Dad gave me for my birthday the other year, I find that I learn so much more about a thinker from this angle than I do by reading such masterpieces of self-consciousness as Augustine's The Confessions or Lewis' Surprised By Joy alone. This first volume, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1: Family Letters, 1905-1931, is surprisingly painful at parts, to see the unedited tensions in his relationship with his father, and the dull shock of the decimated generation of young men that made it home from the World War I fields of France. But there's also the educational process going into the making of a great literary scholar and just the naked, sharp thinking and flair for illustration that would become his trademarks as an educator. In the back of my mind is lurking the Alan Jacobs essay that frey_at_last or amea did the great favour of pointing out to me, from First Things entitled "The Second Coming of C. S. Lewis" which does so well in pointing out the negative side of the "personality cult" that has evolved around Lewis in American evangelicalism. The unique factors of why Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings would appeal to this American audience are not going to be repeated in that way again, and the evangelical eyes that have kept looking for and announcing "the next C. S. Lewis" are doomed to disappointment, while in the meanwhile great theology and literature is being produced and could pass by relatively unnoticed since it didn't fulfill the expected form. The letters keep the reader focused instead on reality, with its triumphs and failures. I've been especially interested the last several days, hauling the book with me to the breakfast table and such, as I march through 1922 and a world so different, though still – astonishingly – in living memory....

This last week featured lots of running around with Jen, more than I would have thought possible after the comparatively excessive amount of free time that it was possible to squeeze out of my Spring Break. Last Sunday, after trying out a French restaurant south of the Third Ward, we took in the Saw Doctors' concert at the Potawatami Bingo Casino, which was the ultimate cap to a Saint Patrick's Day weekend. Jen had done the Exactly Perfect Thing when I invited her to the concert: she had asked to borrow their discs from me so that she could go into the show somewhat familiar with the music. To me, that's just a great sign of someone who is actually going to listen to the music, and the very fact that this stands out to me as a positive trait just goes to show how shallow people's interaction with music is these days. Although the Saw Doctors aren't known in the States nearly to the extent that they are in Ireland and the U.K., they do have a loyal fan base here in land of Irish Fest (the world's largest Irish cultural festival). Like countrymen U2, the band has been around long enough that any concert has a certain "best of" quality, because they have such a well-established selection of hits and first-rate songs to be able to draw upon. The setlist for this show was no exception:

Star Trek – Original Series Main Title (goofy piped-in intro music as the band takes the stage)
N17
We May Never Get To Say Good-Bye Again
Presentation Boarder
It Won't Be Tonight
Ivana in the Brogue (new and unreleased)
Tommy K (with a wild, offbeat intro)
Green and Red of Mayo (the most epic version I've ever heard. Incredible.)
She's Got It (a great new one.)
Galway And Mayo (with Croke Park/"Maroon and White" interlude)
Share the Darkness
Your Guitar
Exhilarating Sadness
I'll Say Goodnight
To Win Just Once
Clare Island (gorgeous. Different than the great 2003 Summerfest version, but still fabulous)
I'll Be On My Way
Bless Me Father
That's What She Said Last Night

(encore)
D'ya Wanna Hear My Guitar?
Joyce Country Céilí Band
I Useta Lover
Why Do I Always Want You
What A Day
Hay Wrap (with Leo's subliminal message "Everyone's a winner at Potawatami Casino")

We were laughing earlier that a lot of the rest of the week was a bit of a blur. Friday night, though, we took in the opening night of Julie Riederer's playing in a production of a play entitled As Bees In Honey Drown, which took us by surprise. We were expecting a more whimsical comedy and instead found ourselves in a story with its clearly comedic moments, but centered around a man caught in a web of fraud and false identity. The second act came together strongly, and we found ourselves definitely interested in the play on its own merits and not just for the sake of a friend among the players. I spoke with Jules' folks afterwards and then introduced her and Jen: it wasn't the best of times to be able to run with such an introduction, but a good performance and the high from that made for a comfortable time to make such introductions.

"Introductions" was really the theme of the weekend, with me meeting Jen's inner circle over Indian food for dinner on Saturday at the tasteful bungalow of her friend and collaborator Ricky, with whom she offered a coaching/yoga course earlier this year: a combination that's apparently well-established on the coasts but is still finding its place here in the heartland. The bungalow itself, and Ricky's highly complimentary furniture selections for it actually gave me my intro conversation with Ricky and Doug, another friend, and our mutual friend Roger kept the group in shrieking, painful laughter with a few choice stories that we thought would make the core to a fine book of misadventures.

Tonight was her meeting Mike and Donna, Dan and Amy over at Dan and Amy's where we grilled out in the unexpected 70s weather for the first time this year, after Dan, Mike and I had returned from Marquette's annual "theological event of the year," the 38th Annual Père Marquette Theology Lecture, 2007's 'Wheels Within Wheels': William Blake and Ezekiel's Merkabah in Text and Image by Prof. Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland's Professor of the Exegisis of Holy Scripture and Fellow of the Queen's College, The University of Oxford. That was an unexpected angle into the Jewish mysticism that we frequently examine here, but it was both a fine presentation (with the first use of multimedia for Blake's art and poetry in a Père Marquette Lecture) and a good set of questions afterward. Jen seemed to go over very well with the group, and, like the night before, I was very comfortable. So those two nights mark another Standard New Relationship Milestone passed. She even sat through our fanatical viewing of the season finale of Battlestar Galactica without giving any impression of feeling left out, even though she didn't know the show at all, and jumped into our rambling talk of that and other things without missing a beat. So she rules.

The end of the recorded journal from the Europe Trip 2006 through Geneva, Venice and Florence.

Tuesday 25 July 2006
3:42pm
Sitting at the gate in Newark right now, waiting for the flight to Milwaukee to start boarding shortly. The last day closed fabulously. What is it today? Today’s the 26th, so yesterday was the 25th. So I think the last entry I made was over at Saint Pierre. I walked back over to meet Erik over at his bus stop at around 5:15, 5:30, after he got done at the WHO. I just took my time wandering the streets in a casual, meandering way after having walked through the Birds and Cats display at the Barbier Mueller Museum. In particular, I walked down the streets with my mind focused on 6th-7th century Geneva as I'd seen it in the excavations at Saint-Pierre, and made a point to try to walk through what the layout of the city then had been like, working my way down to the Church of the Madeleine, where the ancient necropolis had given way to the Christian memorials to the dead and the proclamation of the Resurrection.

We went back to his apartment because I hadn’t had any time to clean; I had been out there all day. Sweaty. Just felt nasty, and my feet were aching by that point, kind of like we had been in Florence after a long day of walking. So I showered and so forth, but we had this dinner date set up for us by a friend of a friend of Erik’s sister, who knew these girls that we should hang out with. So I’m asking Erik who these girls are, he says he doesn’t know. I’m like,

“Are they our age? Are they in their fifties? Are we entertaining some older matrons or somebody’s kids?”
He says he doesn’t know.
“What’s this place we’re meeting them at?”
He says he doesn’t know.
What time?
Doesn’t know.
I said, “But what –?”
“Shutthefuckup!”

He had some information via email so we took off that day to meet that day to meet Crisi, short for Cristina, and Isi, short for … Isabo? Isabel? I should check on that. We had to switch buses: they were way over on the left back – on the other side of Lake Geneva/Lac Léman – up Quai de Cologny toward the French border, well a ways up there, longer even than Erik had guessed by the stops. So we get off on the road, looking around, and there’s a girl walking toward us, putting on a motorcycle helmet and walking toward some bikes, and so now I’m thinking, “Ahhh… well, now we’ll have to know if they biked it!” They had picked this place to meet us that was just right on the beach: a veranda, a couple of seasonal tent/light wood, beach house kinds of bars. Almost the type of thing you would see on a Florida beach, except that there was just a low wall and people were jumping into the lake from there, but there was no sand beach or anything. So we walked out onto the veranda and just started looking around. Finally Erik noticed people who seemed to be looking around at newcomers, and did the whole smile, hand wave, “Are-you-the-right-person?” thing. And so we met Isi and Crisi, and just sat down and started talking, and had an absolute blast with these two.

They were around our age, which I privately felt was a lucky break on our part, and were both comfortably and casually hip: they were about a year apart in age, and clearly very different people, not even looking too much alike to me, although I think that they shared the same light green or ivy-coloured eyes. But they also evidenced a connection that went beyond just being sisters, and seemed to have a friendship that made an interesting parallel to that of mine and Erik’s. Their English – also luckily for us – was fabulous. They had both lived in the States for about ten years, back in their grade school years. Their father is a professor of Cardiology at Lausanne. Crisi definitely had a French accent to her English, but Isi’s American accent was almost dead on, so it was hysterical to all of a sudden shift from speaking French to her American English because it was like downshifting from fifth to third gear, with a little bit of the sudden jarringness of the shift. The conversation was just regular, get-to-know-one-another type stuff, “Who are you? What do you do?”-type things. Isi has at this point been working in real estate, but she has just about had it with that, back in Lausanne. Crisi is working for a lawyer in Geneva right now, and getting ready for her own bar exam, but is also perhaps the most wanderlust-possessed person I’ve ever met: living in the Far East, living in the States, living throughout Europe, so I don’t expect that she’s sticking around in Geneva for very much longer. So the two of them are looking at big change pretty shortly. They were interested in us: our travels, our degree programs, what we were doing, and so it was just a hit right off the bat, because they are intelligent, educated, cosmopolitan, and just great fun in all ways.

So we probably sat there by the lake for an hour, drinking sodas or beers, and starting to figure one another out a little bit. Lots of laughing. Reaching into her bag, Crisi asked if we were those kinds of Americans that were fanatical about people not smoking, and Erik took great glee in informing on me that I was exactly such a person. I quickly interjected that I was much more interested here in being polite, though, and that she should feel free: I hardly wanted to kick off the evening by offending our companions. In passing, she then asked me why I had strong feelings on the matter, whether it was a health thing or what, and I acknowledged both that and that I just can't stand the smell of tobacco. But we moved quickly on to more entertaining talk: telling some of our stories, particularly Erik and I traveling together, how we knew one another from the University of Notre Dame and a bit about the school, stuff about the Freeks and the Folk Choir, our degree programs, how his work in Psychology had brought him to the World Health Organization and the outlandish fact of me being a theologian, family details (naturally I showed über-cute pictures of Grace and Haley to great success) and things like that. We got there late, I think it had to be a little after six-thirty; there was a storm over on the other side of Lake Geneva, maybe out toward Nyon, and so we were watching that creep down the shore a ways, but not quite toward us. Seeing some lightning strikes from such a distance was still startling somehow. Of course, it was all very pretty: the sunset more over Geneva and then the storm farther off to the north.

Finally, Erik proposed grabbing some dinner and we went looking for Isi’s car. I don’t quite know the story about the car: I guess it’s Isi’s car and I guess it was Isi’s dog that made Isi’s car something that she was apologizing for so much. She has a golden retriever, upon which she dotes, and there was about another golden retriever’s worth of hair in the back seat. So she was all appalled by that, but they had brought swimming gear and towels, in case we had wanted to take a dip, but that ended up not happening, so we threw a towel across the hairy seat, and I jumped into the front while Erik and Crisi jumped in the back, and off we went. Of course, we had no plan at this point. I was all for going somewhere – anywhere – in France, just so that I could get over the border and say that I had been in France: to add it to my list of countries in the most pathetically-possible way. But we turned around and headed back toward Geneva and that got to be absolutely hysterical, listening to the two of them start to squabble with one another. As soon as any stress entered into the conversation between the two of them, whether it was “Look out! You’re going to crash!” driving-type stress, or if it was just “Where should we go for dinner? I like this place. I don’t like this place. You like this place. I don’t like this place.” then they would immediately fall into their French by default and would then swing back out and make a report to me and Erik about the momentary consensus or results of the French argument or interjection.

This went on for a little while, and in fact I started filming it because they were so funny fighting with one another.

Then they called another one of their sisters (the two of them being the two eldest of six children in a Catholic family in a Protestant canton in Switzerland there; five daughters, I believe, and maybe the fourth child is the son, and the last two are twin girls, sixteen, who are currently in the States with their parents for the year and are giving them all sorts of grief about being so old) and soon we had the third sister and her boyfriend also suggesting things over the cell phone, while the girls continued to squawk at one another and so forth. This couple was thinking of joining us, but there was some debate going on about whether or not to go over and eat at some place in the Paquis, Erik's neighbourhood, which I've mentioned was full of all sorts of places featuring food from around the world. The sister, Elena, and her boyfriend Patrick, apparently decided to pass on the possibility of joining us, leaving us to continue talking about what kind of food to grab as we kept on driving. At one point, I came to understand that the place currently under debate between the girls was an illegal Indian restaurant run out of some immigrant's apartment. Because of questions of health code – I had visions of Upton Sinclair and The Jungle dancing in my head – I raised some half-serious hue and cry about how this might be the last desperate act of people who couldn't get jobs elsewhere. The ladies agreed with me earnestly, taking my words to be a socially-sensitive statement of sympathy about the plight of immigrants, and enthused in support of the restauranteurs, while Erik laughed away in realizing that I was in fact speaking from tongue-in-cheek horror at the thought of eating there. Erik also jumped into the fray by pointing out that I wouldn't mind eating something of distinctly Swiss cuisine, although I had no idea that that might be. Crisi said it was heavy on cheeses, which was a surprise to me as I'd imagined something more along the lines of German food, and I worried that a cheese-heavy meal might set off my odd digestive system, and I had no desire whatsoever to miss out on the girls' company by having to occupy the restroom all evening. Isi interjected, though, that Swiss food was a rather dismal thing in general and not worth our time that evening. We were getting to the point where we were locked in a pattern of politely deferring to one another and thus making no decision, and the laughable silliness of it all was threatening to run out of steam.

So all through this we had made a pretty significant loop down into Geneva and around to the University, down where I had been earlier that morning. Finally we pulled over right there and went walking across the green, past the Wall – the Reformation Memorial – which Erik hadn’t seen yet, and on up into the old quarter for dinner, which was a great, great, great choice. So they picked some place where you got half a poulet – half a chicken: I think I said that correctly – and frites, salad, and all for something like eight or nine francs. The place is called Chez ma Cousine, and I believe that Isi said that it was a popular spot during student days at the University of Geneva, from which we had had an easy walk. It was an inspired choice. They serve half a roasted chicken, potato wedges and a salad. Period. I think there are three options on the menu for season, but essentially they do the one thing and they do it well, and it was just the kind of easy solid food without fuss that was perfect for the night, as it allowed us to not take it too seriously and to stay focused on one another. It was just off the top of the hill somewhere there, a little bit below Saint Pierre. So we got a table there, although the girls went around the corner to check on another place they liked, just in case, but that was closed. It didn’t take us long to get a table – inside rather than outside, unfortunately, so it was a little bit hotter.

Dinner continued with great conversation. We had no lack of ease in being able to get along with these girls: they were just two great people. So … I don’t know … what did we talk about at dinner? I can remember at one point discussing our personal phobias, arguing whether certain things were too cliché to be phobias. I can remember lots of little bits: even just the fact that I was keeping a journal in this fashion, recording things along the way because they would take too long to write, they said that this was so American, that Americans are always doing something, and filling their time up with these things, and so forth. That was entertaining: I don’t hear the American stereotypes or impressions like that ever, so that was illuminating, I suppose, in some minor way. I think it was Isi who marveled at the journal and “Americans are always doing something like that! You know, so creative, so go-get-’em; filling their time.” It was such a … I’d never been seen as unusual or admirable for something like that. It was strange – but just the kind of thing I love – to suddenly get a cross-cultural vision of something I do, and to thus see it – and Americans – through other eyes. We talked about siblings, and I of course had a chance to wax eloquent about Grace and Haley. We spoke of travel, places we’ve been and wanted to be. Erik and I talking about our adventures in Venice and Florence over the weekend, and also earlier in Tunisia and Rome, telling them about traveling with Hugh. I can’t seem to come up with a whole else. I remember learning a Swiss phrase: our chicken was very well salted, more salted than perhaps any dish I’ve ever received. Crisi was sitting next to me and simply said, “He’s in love.” And I didn’t quite know what this meant, but apparently it’s a Swiss saying that, should you ever receive a meal that’s been too well salted, you say that the chef is in love. I guess that it’s the idea that they’re so distracted by being in love that they get careless with their salting or seasoning. So that was new. I didn’t know what that meant at first, and we kind of came back to it later on because she had just kind of said it offhand, and I wasn’t sure how to respond to that or what was actually being said. So it was funny, then, when she finally explained it.

Inevitably love and romance wove it's way into the conversation, all very comfortably. Because it was one of those situations where we had all more-or-less decided to start at the level of being good friends, especially since we might never see one another again, there was no point in holding back. That was the chief wonder and delight of this night: four people truly letting themselves meet and be met, without much reserve. It's a risk we might not have taken if we had met in a more normal way, with greater potential to encounter one another again. (How backwards of humanity is that?!) Crisi teased that Isi was collecting diamonds from the fellow she was seeing, and that she very well might be considered to have received a proposal or two at this point. Isi rolled with that and explained to us that she might have two diamonds, but she had ten fingers, and so there was plenty of room for more. Isi sounded much less easy to pin down, given her own penchant for living abroad, and that she would likely be doing so again after she had completed her training in the law. Erik and I told something of our own stories, and I was struck by Crisi’s challenging me about the idea of not being open to someone who might be open to following where I’m wandering. I had talked about not having dated anyone seriously for some time – partially because of dealing with the health issues and surgeries I'd had the last few years, but also just the knowledge that I was just passing through Milwaukee and would leave within a year or so – but she was adamant that that wasn't really something I had the right to use as an excuse not to date: that the point was to find someone willing to be uprooted. I conceded that she probably was right on that point, but more I was just honoured by her willingness to challenge me on the point: it was the kind of thing that emphasized to me how "real" we were willing to be with each other this night, and nothing delights me more than enjoying such honesty and openness in people – to really dare to know and be known. It's what I've always enjoyed about my friends, and it just pleased me in letting me see the sisters as "our kind of people."

We wandered out, and we decided then that it was time for after-dinner drinks, even though it was already after ten o’clock on a work night and Isi still had to drive forty minutes or an hour to get back to Lausanne. But we wandered up the street a little bit to where a couple of huge bars or cafés spilled out all over the square, La Place du Bourg-de-Four. The girls had walked a bit ahead and Erik was orienting me, drawing my attention to where the tower at the Cathedral was rising above the rooftops around the square, and where the Jet d'Eau could also be glimpsed at its height. But we settled at a table in one of the cafés that had spread into the flagstoned square and placed our drink orders with a waiter, as the lively crowd and sounds of music from one of the other clubs all blended together to just give me an impression of life being lived well on this warm summer night.


3: 59pm
So last-minute drinks and more talking: where people were going, and me having to go back the next morning to the United States. Despite the alcohol, this was a bit more sober discussion: what did the future hold for each of us? Having met and enjoyed one another's company in passing, where was life taking us? I asked Isi in a more serious way about this guy she was seeing, and Crisi about specific countries she might be entertaining a move to, and what she might do with her law degree abroad. More significant and quiet questions of that sort were now traded. Now, as the conversation washed over me, I began to regret that I was leaving in a big way. We all hit it off really well, and I can totally see Erik hanging out with them again. So I'll envy him that opportunity. When we did push away from the table, though, and time seemed to speed up to its normal pace, it was with some renewed (or enhanced!) laughter and light-heartedness. Experimental photography was conducted, with Crisi protesting at what she thought the least-flattering of the group poses. (She was right, and that photo has been edited out for everyone's sake.) Seeing a store sign that proclaimed Presence, I insisted that the girls pose under it because I melodramatically told them with that it was their sheer presence that I wanted to capture on film. Naturally, they rejected that overwrought idea and proceeded to make horrible faces, not unlike their sixteen year-old twin sisters, in photographs that were later forwarded to me, which indicated to me that Isi and Crisi weren't nearly so advanced in maturity as the twins accused them of being. So the walk back to the car and the end of the night was funny, satisfying, and all too soon over.

It was one of those things where you really seem to develop a friendship very quickly. They expected to be in contact with me over the internet, and whether or not this happens, I don’t know, but I would certainly not mind in the least, and I would totally expect to see them – they were in the States just last month – I would totally expect to run into them at some point in the future, or host them. So hopefully I’ll be a professor in a few years here, and have a little more space to host than in a grad student’s apartment. But I might also never hear from them again after a few exchanges, and that, too, would be perfectly natural, if a great loss. It's hard to be friends long-distance, of course, with so little shared time, or without the oddity of being online journalers.

But we finally called it a night, and took Crisi home, dropping her off at her scandalous two-bedroom apartment, which I learned is scandalous because Geneva has a real space or housing crunch, they told us; she said there would be something of a riot if it was found out that she had a two-bedroom apartment to herself. Then Isi dropped us off, after a final lesson in French culture and manners. (After saying good-night to Crisi, I had laughed about the polite kiss-on-either-cheek custom, which was not something my family had done when I was growing up, and which had me confused or inexperienced when I had arrived in Tunisia. I had originally done more of an actual kiss on the cheek rather than the sort of mock-kiss that is the greeting and farewell in Arab and European cultures, and thus found myself the subject of a suddenly very appraising and sly look from one of Mohamed’s teenage nieces. Isi laughed and proceeded to give us a very precise lecture on the subject.) And that brought the night to a close. So the conversation and opportunity to get to know these two gems was so much fun: the best sort of capstone to the entire experience.

Erik and I went straight back to his room in the Paquis: I had to do my packing still, and Erik was dropping off pretty quickly. We made a few plans for the next day and how we were going to pull that off. I woke up about a half-hour before the alarm went off. I probably didn’t get to bed until a little after 1:00am and woke up at 6:30am. I’m amazed at how little sleep I’ve gotten on this trip and how well I’ve functioned in spite of that fact. So I woke up before Erik did, and just stuck my head out of the open window and looked at the cool dawn light in this fairly ugly nook of Geneva there, and just took in the feel of the city a little bit, since this was it. Even just the fact that they don’t have screens on the windows – you just stick your head out a window – is one of those tiny differences from the States. So I got ready, and we had some trouble finding the bus stop. The location for it had changed for the bus to the airport: it was all the way over on the other side of Notre Dame – the nearby Catholic church which, to my regret, I had no opportunity to explore, given that is was an important namesake for our history – from the train station. Erik walked me over and we said our good-byes there. I had to thank him for an incredible week, where in traveling to the places we had, he had opened up such beauty to me. He paused outside the bus, clearly waiting to wave me off as I pulled away. But before that happened, I was distracted by two very attractive young women who I started to chat with, a brunnette and a blonde who were both from Brazil, and had that look of young people who had been backpacking across Europe. Before I knew it, we were well away from the bus stop and I could just imagine how irritated Erik must be with me for blowing off his efforts at a final good-bye by immediately dropping him for the closest girls I could find. Sorry, Erik! (And, uh … I gotta go! Though I’m in row 7 with a window seat: I could have killed for a window seat on the flight back transcontinentally, and wasn’t even seated next to a person with a window seat, and we went close to Greenland, we went over England, Ireland, and there were all these people who just shut their visors and don’t use the view, and I thought it was absolutely criminal. So, 7-A here: I hope I get a good view of New York City here, at least, as we take off. [I didn’t.])


5:23pm
Well, we’re in the air, probably over Pennsylvania now and I haven’t totally been able to follow my own advice: I’ve been nodding since I was on the runway. But I did catch a little bit of a view as we took off. We went south, so not much of a view of the city, but there were amazing, amazing shipyards lining the coast here in New Jersey/Newark. So I’m on page 40 of this equally-amazing little book I bought yesterday, Geneva in Early Christian Times, detailing the excavations around Saint Pierre. It’s probably a little bit out-of-date – it’s copyright 1986, after all – but it looks like they had done quite a bit of the work that I saw yesterday by that point. But I will keep my eye open for a second edition. Amazing work here. I’m so glad that I got this, because it gives such a lie to the term “Dark Ages.” All of this work – these layers of civilization that we see here through Geneva’s episcopal center through the early Middle Ages – it’s all so sophisticated and involved. So, what? it’s got to be around 5:00pm local time, East Coast Time, so 11:00pm Geneva Time, so I am really starting to drag at this point. I’ll try to take a hit of caffeine here to keep me going, because it’s only 4:00pm Central Time. I’ve got a ways to go on this day yet.


And before too much more time had passed, I was back in the City of Festivals. I had to laugh the other day as I was tramping through the snow, in thinking over how long it's taken me to transcribe this journal from my digital recorder's files to the LiveJournal. I found myself hoping that the me 30 years from now is appreciative of all the efforts I've taken on his behalf, because this was a lot of work just to make sure that he still has a reasonable access to all these memories of mine. Obviously, I was laughing because the current me being slightly annoyed at a future me was borderline lunacy, although it made a kind of loopy and amusing sense. And it's true: those years and events I don't write down, I lose all too easily. All of these days were too fabulous to risk that way. Travels, new foods, new sights, old and new friends: it's the stuff of which lives are made.


Go to: The Final Note of the Trip

Bloody hell. The non-healing sore on the side of my nose turned out not to be just a weird little wound that wouldn't heal, nor an evil killer zit, but cancer. The biopsy I had on Tuesday came back Friday afternoon as a basal cell carcinoma, very basic, non-metastasizing, and not really dangerous. So I won't have to have chemo or radiation, but I will have a surgery to remove it in the spring. It turns out it's probably from the same period of corticosteroid use in 1998-2000 that messed up my hips and knee and ended my running career: that the prescription's warning about avoiding the sun while on the drug was also dead-on. Yay. But I'm glad that it's labeled and going to be dealt with. That's way better than wondering what the deal is.

Other notes: I've had a couple of fun dinners the last few weeks. I ran into Diane at Collector's Edge on Thursday and we hung out there like old days, talking with each other and with Matt until it closed at seven, and then ended up grabbing dinner at the Twisted Fork and talking until they turned out the lights on us. She'd gotten back from her work/vacation trip to Hawaii a few days earlier and was as brown as a nut, in good spirits from the trip, if a little tired, and with lots of stories to tell. The next night I was over at Uncle Bill's and Aunt Helen's for a welcome-back party for my cousin Becca, who had flown in that morning from visiting her brother in Argentina. Ben's a junior at Ripon College and Becca's a freshman at Madison, and the party had morphed from just me to three friends of Bill and Helen's – including one guy I've met before who grew up with Bill and my Mom and all, and thus who always has the most interesting stories to tell – and some half-dozen of Becca's friends from high school who were still around. That was all lively, with Becca's manic story-telling style and her vast digital picture file on her laptop. Helen talked about how much more she seemed to have grown in experience from these two weeks compared to the whole first semester of going to university.

For my new Intro classes, I've been assigned the ugliest room in the University, complete with disgusting gray carpet, now worn and disturbingly-stained, in the ugliest building on campus, which looks like it was from the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At least the slightly-curved floor-to-ceiling window shapes are a bit more interesting-looking from the inside than the are from the outside. I scared away a few students with my anti-slacker hard-work warnings from the first day, but an equal number of students added the course, so I'm still hovering around fifty students, which will be easier grading than the 75 from last semester, I suppose.

I have sixty pages left of Kristin Lavransdatter, and I'll be sad to be done with her. My friend and colleague Matthew Sutton has read it closely in the past – basing a course on marriage off of it, in fact – and referred to it as an epic the other day, which really is so true, if in such a non-epic, quotidian way. I'll have to write up a real review of it, I think.

Tuesday 25 July 2006
8:57am
Now it’s Thursday … Thursday?! No. Tuesday. Tuesday morning. I suppose getting toward 9ish. I’m sitting on the steps of Sacré Coeur, just past where the Rue Général-Dufour breaks off from the Boulevard Georges Favon, that I've been walking down. It's just a little ways down the street from the synagogue here in town, which I stopped and looked at for a little while, underneath the trees in front of it, at the damp fountain. Regretting now for the first time, in a very personal way, not being able to speak French at all, after a blonde and bouncy baker was trying to flirt with me as I bought some éclairs. So … too bad. She lit up for some reason in the most satisfying way. Too much fun!

So, heading further on down and gonna break over toward the Museum of the History of the Reformation before too long here. Erik and I are going out tonight with two women who are friends of a friend of his sister's. So, don’t know what’s to be expected there. Hopefully more success than I just had with the baker, socially! Hopefully they speak English or we are sunk: gonna be a long night. Eh, it’ll be fun. Different. It will be nice to meet some locals, actually. Anyway, the plan for today is the Museum, then head up to the Cathedral de Saint Pierre, go up the tower of that, then underneath into the archaeological digs, and see what that leaves me of the day.

+++
I soon found myself approaching the University of Geneva from its west side, near the building that was marked in my guidebook as holding the Museum of the Reformation. I gathered that the entry was on the other side from me, away from the street, so I started looking for a way to walk around the building. I went down a street, along a high, wrought-iron fence, until I found an open gateway, where the path led back toward the Museum building. Dodging an enthusiastic sprinkler – but enjoying the way the morning light played through it and illumined the glowing green parkspace – I followed the path to where it led to an odd, seemingly-inappropriate block of stood. It was only as I got closer that I could see that the stone was carved in a striking way that had not been apparent from farther away: a nude female figure, collapsed in despair and loss, her form both leaning upon the stone and also flowing out from the it, with the veil of the hair of her bowed head flowing back into into the stone. A script on the other side of the stone from me revealed that the piece was offered by the French people of Geneva in memory of the losses of the First World War, if I read it correctly. This statue was a surprise for me – nothing I'd expected to find or had read about – and I found myself unexpectedly moved by it: that it conveyed something to me of what that generation experienced of overwhelming loss and mourning. I spent a little time with it, walking around it and admiring it from other angles, enjoying the success of how effective and simple it was: it seemed to me to be a real achievement for whoever the artist had been. Then I continued up the path, walking around a more conventional statue memorial for Henri Dunant, whose name and story I now knew well, from the day before, as the founder of the International Red Cross.

As I came around the building and found its entrance, I discovered that the Museum of the Reformation was no longer in this building, and no longer on the campus of the University at all. I was given directions to a building just to the side of the Cathedral, which was further down on my list of places to visit this day, anyway. I stood at the heart of the campus, filmed a bit of a panorama, taking in the buildings and just trying to feel for a moment what it was like to be a student on this campus, from what you could just tell by the architecture and grounds. Then I turned and walked across the broad parkspace on the campus grounds to the edge where the long wall of the Memorial to the Reformation stretched across the rising ground heading toward the heart of Old Geneva.

The Memorial, almost all in wall form except for a few outlying blocks of stone, is focused on the Geneva or Reformed churches' Reformation, and not the entire Reformation. So Luther and Zwingli were only briefly "mentioned" by having their names inscribed on the outlying blocks, while the length of the wall is centered on John Calvin and what flowed from the events of what occurred in Geneva, even to the Reformed Pilgrims and their efforts in the colony in Massachusetts. I took a gazillion pics of the thing, with its various little sub-memorials, narratives and texts. A lot of it I figured would be something I would be able to take in in detail when I could study the pics back in America, and that I would end up spending far more time at the wall than I could afford if I tried to take it all in today while I was actually there. And, to be honest, I was more interested in seeing what the Museum would get across to me about the Geneva Reformation than this Memorial could, perhaps particularly because – even as a "church historian" – this is the least interesting part of Reformation history to me. I was far more interested and even enthralled by the work I did on Luther as Mickey Mattox's teaching assistant during the past spring semester. Still, it was interesting to see the kinds of consequences – like the Pilgrims and the growth of the American experiment – that the Memorial chose to take in. After a while here, I began to follow the weaving path that took me up the hill, into the well-kept and picturesque winding medieval streets of Old Geneva, working my way to the square where the steeple and towers of the Cathedral dominate the city, and where the Museum and Cathedral awaited.




+++
1:24pm
Well, I just came out of the Museum of the Reformation. I’m sitting in the courtyard in front of Saint Pierre, Saint Peter’s Cathedral, which I guess is now quite a Protestant church, despite the audacity of the name! I haven’t gone inside yet: that’s next. The Museum was interesting … I think it would not grab a child, that’s for sure: perhaps a little on the dry side. I had a great conversation inside with a girl working the desk, whose name was Shiveh Reed. “Shiveh” was new to me. A Persian name: her mother being Persian, her father being Irish. But the girl’s at Wellesley: junior, studying history, studying Reformation history, and has been here this year, and is looking toward doctoral work. So we talked shop a little bit. It was interesting to hear her story of coming to faith in Wellesley, and to hear her thoughts about the politics of the school and so forth. So, a bright one: no doubt she has a great future in front of her, and I will see her at the meetings someday.

The Museum itself, though, was … kinda Protestant-ish, I guess. It was very word oriented. Certainly there were a lot of images from history, a lot of engravings blown large and so forth, but you didn’t have anything of the sacramental, symbolic value to speak of: some crosses and some communion cups early in, but after that it was historical lessons, clips of music, images of the city. Definitely it was the history of the Reformation here: Luther was given very little time and space. It ended with glances at Barth and such. The oddest room was a dinner table room with a recorded exchange by a bunch of theologians, thinkers, including Rousseau, arguing about Predestination. The actors appaarently had never heard anyone talk about such things except some kind of a French version of a late-night TV preacher (or – God help us – the History or Discovery Channels and their “historical” re-enactments) because everything sounded like a homicidal threat! One opinion about the doctrine of predestination gets to the end and you hear “And I will kill the rest of you!” Although this was not exactly said, it certainly seemed implied! Speaking as a theologian myself, who is very accustomed to theological conversations, particularly around the dinner table, I’ve never heard anything like that in my life! So, that was … um, sobering.

So, the Museum of the Reformation is right next door to the Cathedral, unlike my guidebook, which had it over at the University. I thus found out that the current Insight Guide for Switzerland is four years old. So I went the long way around the city to get here. But I did see quite a bit, so that was nice, and I took in the impressive Wall – of the Monument to the Reformation – which, like the Museum here, is utterly focused on the Geneva Reformation and its results. So, Luther and Zwingli were present only as entry stones coming in. So, Erik was right that the heart of the city here – the high city, probably inside old city walls – I wonder if part of what I walked up to get here, from where the University and the Reformation Monument were, might have been parts of old city walls. This is all very much more “medieval European”-looking: hilly cobblestoned, or early bricked, and high, narrow streets, wandering whichever way. Gorgeous, though. Wonderful upkeep. Certainly, probably the high end of the city price-wise here, too, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover. So, anyway, got a 12th century St. Peter’s in front of me with an 18th century neoclassical façade. And, I’m sure, stripped altars inside. So I suppose I should tackle that next. I don’t know if it’s probably … noon? The time certainly was running away from me. One-thirty! Okay, so … off we go!


3:45pm
Well, I’ve made it a little farther away from my last recording spot: I’m now on the other side of the square in front of Saint Pierre. I went into Saint Pierre: very stripped down, very Protestant – classically, in that sense – with the shape of a medieval cathedral and the austerity that one expects in a Calvinist center of worship. The lovely woodwork of the pulpit area, front and center, elevated high and projected forward ….



(This is an especially LARGE file)
The real treasure, though – the main church probably all of took all of ten minutes to fully absorb the wood and the stone and the sense of the place – the real treasure is the archaeological dig underneath. For that I went and purchased the text on, although I’m nervous that it has a 1986 date in it. The work is still continuing, and it seems to just be an absolute treasure trove, not just of early church life in Geneva, but just of the history of the settlement and this area itself. Tribes before Christ, before the Romans, before Caesar came through this way, as I’d read all those years ago reading The Gallic Wars for the first time under Marvin Powell. I, for one, would be very inclined to do as the English-speaker on the audio guide said, and make this a trip that I came back to, or a place that I’d come back to over and over again. I don’t know that Geneva lies in my future, but I don’t know anything that lies in my future at this point. But that would be up on my list if I ever came back here. I spoke very briefly to one of the archaeologists who was on the scene at work here, mostly just curious under whose auspices the work is being carried out – I was wondering if it was a local university or a consortium of that sort or the church, I suppose – but he said that it was a state interest that was taking it forward. But all of it was just one of the most immensely accessible, informative, and laden-with-variety sites I have ever seen for an archaeological experience. So Four Stars through and through for that one.

I don’t know: I haven’t gone up in the tower – I’m afraid that I’m not terribly inclined to do so, as classic as that’s supposed to be. [Erik later took me to task for this, letting me know that I was an idiot for missing a great view of the city and area, and thus causing me to repent: too late.] So, coming around to quarter-to-four now and I’m supposed to meet Erik at 5:30, and so I’ll start to move!


3:49pm
Hold that thought. Addendum to the former entry: I’m still sitting here, across from the façade of Saint Pierre, and under a frowning statue of Calvin, for whom I’ve never had any patience. One of the fascinating results of this, all of a sudden, is to be here on the top of the hill of Old Geneva and to be looking at the façade of Saint Pierre and now to see the South Cathedral, whose southwestern entrance or corner I must be near, and the North Cathedral would be over there, and the atrium and the Baptistery underneath the stairs…. To see the church from the fourth century, the fifth century, and the ninth century – to see it all laid out here in my eyes, in my head – is one of the real results of a very good presentation here: to be able to see the overlapping structures over the centuries all in my mind’s eye because of this program’s ability to educate on how this space has grown and developed. Again, four stars: great presentation!

+++
Walking around behind the Cathedral, I paused here and there to photograph a few things. I saw the auditorium next to the Cathedral itself where Calvin had apparently done a lot of his teaching, and then worked my way to a tiny parkspace behind and below the Cathedral where the hill drops quickly down toward the lake. Here I took some photographs looking up the back of the Cathedral, caught up in the busy angles of the building, and looking out over the city toward the lake from where I stood straining for the angle from the top of a picnic table, leaning out over a drop to a street cut a distance below. After that, I just found myself refilling my water bottle from one of the street fountains and resting quietly, just watching some mothers in the park as they played with their children or pushed their strollers along while they took in the relative quiet of this part of the city.

When I started working my way down through the winding city streets, still thinking about some of the ancient and medieval details that I'd learned of below the Cathedral and imagining them into the view of the city I now saw, I stumbled upon another of the Museums to which I'd already paid admission in the Museum-group ticket I had picked up days earlier during the Swiss Guard exhibition at the Museum of the Swiss Abroad. This was the vaguely-named Barbier Mueller Museum, and – this being my last day, after all, and with a bit of time to kill before going to meet Erik and the Mystery Women – I ducked in through the unassuming doorway off the street I'd been walking down.

At first, I have to admit I was slightly baffled. The first wide room I found myself in had an unattended counter where someone ought to have been to greet and charge me. I was alone in the room, and scattered around me, and up the curving staircase and along the balcony running around the room, were a variety of artworks that seemed to have no relation to each other whatsoever. But they were all clearly all treasures, and I had an idle temptation to simply seize my favourite and walk out with it, just because I was so unusually unattended. But setting that amusing picture aside, I focused on the art and began moving around the room. (A young woman did eventually appear and "check me in" and I had been quick to spot the camera trained on me and the pieces.) The styles were radically different. Aztec or modern; Egyptian or Medieval European; Greek or Chinese. Finally, before I finally found a text or banner that told me, I realized what it was I was looking at: cats and birds. I'd never seen anything quite like it at larger art museums: instead of being organized by style, era or approach, the exhibition was one organized by theme. "Birds and Felines, Compared Arts" It made for occasionally jarring, almost humourous transitions, but it was easy to get caught up such a basic theme – creatures we saw all the time, everywhere – and yet to see the wildly differnt ways they had been incorporated into human arts, whether as casual decoration or cultic instruments. I talked for a brief time with a student who had come in after me, who was from Mexico, but mostly just moved through the rooms silently, losing some forty-five minutes or an hour there before continuing on toward my meeting Erik, but now with a quietly pleased smile on my face that such a delightful and somehow light-hearted exhibition had given me.


Go to: Geneva to Milwaukee: Part Two: The Nicod Sisters

Monday 24 July 2006.
On the night train from Florence, Italy to Geneva, Switzerland.
[5:01am – On Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007, after a few moments of confused listening, Mike discovers that at this point is a one hour and eight minute file of the sounds of the train, he apparently having shifted in his train bunk and turned on the recorder in his shorts pocket. Various rustlings are heard as Mike wakes up and watches the sun rise over the Alps, and studies the different views of wilderland, farmland and Alpine villages. He only films a few dim minutes of this as he enters the Alps and his last batteries die. Typical.]
6:40am
Now a deep valley and a wide trainyard – a place with the charming name of “Brig.” But the sunlight on the peaks, clouds on some of them, and snow still up there…. Huge, wide, glorious valley. Ah, I’d love to know where I am and to have time here.


7:15am
Now in the wide, sunny valley of “Sierre.” Kind of a more stereotypical Swiss architecture at the train station, huge bluff-sided mountains and a wide valley. Orchards outside of town. It’s full of light here, and surrounded by powerful, powerful stone. And, we’re moving on….


7:22am
This great long pass through the Alps, and how it seems so unlikely that you’d have something so long and so clear. I wonder if this is the one that we read about in History: the Romans paying such attention to it. [Later: I believe I was thinking of the Brenner Pass. This was the Rhone River valley in Valais.] Terraces; long, steep sides of the valley; old churches and shrines. Lots of growth, though, in these terraces: incredibly rich land for something carved out of rock.


7: 24am
As we roll into Sion: an immense castle up on top of the rock overlooking the town. Or perhaps a monastery. Incredibly easy to defend, it looks. Holy cow: it really commands the whole area.

+++
By the time we are traveling around the north end of Lake Geneva, Erik is up and we say some occasional words to one another as we eat our conductor-provided box breakfasts of croissants and juice. I have by now learned that the jelly-filled croissants are the better ones, the plain ones being just a touch too dry. Our windows are on the north side of the train and so I'm mostly looking at the various towns and cities we are passing through, including Montreux, home of the famed jazz festival, where Erik took in some good music a few weeks back, and Lausanne, home of the famed university which I've heard mentioned time and again in my historical studies. I tried to spy Roman ruins out the window in Nyon (which I had no time to visit), with predictably little luck. Occasionally, I would get up and move out of our compartment into the hallway so that I could enjoy the view of the Lake, until I could glimpse Geneva in the distance at its end.

+++
3:30pm
Sleep Room culture is a strange culture.

So we got back into town today and, what? we arrived, I think, in Geneva around 9:30. Erik, of course, is usually at work at 8:00am, but we had to hustle and just get there as quick as we could. So Erik took a shower, but I forgo … uh … forewent? until later tonight. So I’m feeling a little gamey, but I was able to shave, which was good after Erik had fried my electric shaver before we left for Venice on Thursday. He didn’t bring his electric – or any kind of razor – along because his beard grows a lot slower than mine. So I got rid of that growth, and we must have gotten to the World Health Organization at about 10:30-11ish.

But by 11:30 I was really noddy, so I went to the Rest Room. … Which is a bad name… the Sleep Room, the Recovery Room, the Rest Center. On the eighth and top floor of the World Health Organization headquarters, there is a room full of … couches, I guess you’d call them, technically, or chaise lounges? That’s not quite right … like lawn chairs, but leather, stuffed, and they recline. ([after a loud engine passing] I’m walking down the road to the International Red Cross Museum right now.) So I went into the Rest Room, and there were two people asleep in there – a man and a woman – and I took a chair, sort of equidistant from the both of them, and – I would have loved to have seen the results of this on some kind of hidden camera or secret tape – ‘cause I leaned back in that thing and it just went back and back and back, until I was flat, and then I was leaning heels-over-head back, flatwards. So I’m waving my hands around, trying to regain some sense of balance or control, and sort of pushing off from the floor behind me, to try to get seated again, all the while desperately trying not to make a noise and wake up those already there.

That’s when I saw that there were some levers underneath the chair, and so I thought, “Well, these will control the thing.” Then the levers make these horrendous screeching noises and I’m mortified that I’m going to wake these people up, and they don’t do anything but loosen the chair up even more. Nothing will tighten it up. So I’m leaning back and flapping all over the place – total physical comedy – as this thing is opening and shutting on me and I’m swinging all around with it. So, I took a look around and found that I was seated out away from the wall more than any of the others, and that their lounge chairs we kept up at more comfortable angles simply because they went back into the wall, or into the glass window overlooking the terrace. (Now I’m going past the Soviet consultate or embassy or what-have-you here, the whole thing’s ringed with a wrought-iron fence with a thick hedge on the other side and the whole thing is topped with rings of razor wire. It’s really kind of overkill.)

So I flapped around in that before I finally gained some control, and the woman woke up, over next to me, and I was mortified that I had woken her up, and she strolled out, and I lay back, and the next thing I knew I was waking up two hours later and the room was filled with Africans sleeping all around me that I had not heard come in at all. One fellow was snoring away next to me, and I had lost two hours – or gained two hours, depending on your perspective – but felt much more restful after two nights where I just slept probably for three, four, five hours – that was needed.

So, I knew I would take it easy today, in the early afternoon and morning, so I did that, and now I’m finishing strolling down the hill to the Red Cross. It’s about three o’clock, and I’ll have a couple of hours here – they close at five – so I’ll do the Red Cross Museum, but I’m not really thinking I’m going to do the U.N. tour: Erik said it wasn’t terribly provocative. You see rooms where various agreements happen and so forth; so this should be the better choice. Erik might try to hold off ’til six, do a little extra work, so I’ll just troop back on up the hill and catch him then. The Red Cross entrance here, the building’s much nicer than the U.N., 1950s/60s, future, steel/concrete combination, so … looking promising here.


5:10pm
Well, I have to say that the Museum of the International Red Cross was really compelling. saralinda, you’re all over that. And Erik had been pretty insistent on his enthusiam on that, as well. From its opening display of foundational philosophical and religious texts from around the world that inspire or harmonize with its mission, the Museum did its best to draw you into that mission and vision as well. I was so lost in the details, though, I only made it about 2/3 of the way through, or halfway through, when they were calling for the Museum to close. I didn’t realize it was that late: time had gotten entirely away from me. The … I don’t know … the painstaking-ness that it takes to draw that level of international organization out – to be able to see the slow evolution of something like this – the Museum was very well organized to convey that plodding struggle, that long work. The display of the cases of all the cards – the index files for the prisoners of war of the First World War – were compelling by their massive volume. That was … hmm. There was a weight of humanity behind it that I think one doesn’t feel easily. We tune it out by statistics. We tune it out by a vision of so many people; that we sort of leave them behind as people and see them only as a crowd, if that makes sense. We detach ourselves for protection, I guess. [Another loud buzzing goes by] (It’s strange to see women in incredibly elegant European fashion drive by on mopeds or motorcycles with helmets on.)

+++

On the way back up the hill to the World Health Organization headquarters I ran into Erik's English friend, a young woman in medical school who, like Erik and so many others at the WHO, are advanced students more-or-less volunteering their time at the WHO in order to get some international experience. I was amazed at the sheer volume of such young workers: without these people willing to trade the experience for a financial loss, I don't see how the headquarters could function. Senior, permanent staff seem to be ever managing such a stream of rotating help. We spoke for a few moments – she was one of several of Erik's acquaintances it would have been fun to have the chance to get to know better – and then I continued on up to the Headquarters.

Outside the building, whose look and architecture I commented upon in my first entry on the trip, I took a little time to pay some particular attention to it and to photograph it, finally. (I used this photograph in my first entry, too, even though I was only taking it now, thinking about the journal and wanting to be able to capture some bit of the look and feel of this place in which I've been spending time, sitting with Erik in his office and seeing something of his projects, negotiating with the security staff when I come in each time, until I can finally get my green "Visiteur" badge to hang around my neck while in the building.

The building did have the feel of a place where things got done, though, despite the silly reflexive UN- and NGO-bashing that you hear in American politics. Erik's outlining some of those achievements of the WHO when I arrived – memorialized in the art of various information-soaked public health campaign posters now decorating the halls – was a rather thrilling saga in its own way. No bureaucratic process can be perfect, of course – the structures will create their own problems – but they certainly get things done that no one else can do without similar large-scale bureaucracy, all our sophomoric sneering about bureaucracies aside.

Even the entry had caught my eye with its titles when I had first arrived. Washington, D.C., of course, has a similar feel of action and power to it, too, but despite being the capital of the world's only current superpower, it still lacked something of the immediate international feel that I felt here at the World Health Organization, or from the other buildings in the area, whether national embassies and consulates, the United Nations, or even the World Council of Churches. I think that that was simply because of the immediately obvious multiplicity of languages evident, which the United States famously lacks in its odd situation of being a country the size of a continent with one dominant language.

Outside the main entrance, I also took some time to go over and examine more closely a few pieces of art that I had noticed back on my arrival in Geneva on Thursday. There was a reproduction of a head of the goddess Hygeia by the sculptor Skopas from 350 BC. I don't know this particular goddess but the name and context lead me to believe that Hygeia was rather into hygeine, a goddess of cleanliness, I assume. Matched with this was a particularly compelling work unveiled in 1999 depicting a boy leading a man stricken by the disease called riverblindness, a disease that particularly ravaged large areas of Africa. It is a disease that the World Health Organization has managed to eliminate in the space of a few decades. How's that for some kind of effectiveness? It was a moving reminder of how the organized efforts of such world-wide unions of people can, day by plodding day, work wonders.


During the evening, Erik and I grabbed some food – I can't remember exactly what, something Middle-Eastern, I think, out of Erik's incredibly-diverse neighbourhood, the Paquis, where Erik lived in the somewhat seedy red light district. We decided to wander back down to the Lake and see what we could turn up for our amusement, even if just as seasoning for our conversation. The lakefront was alive with people, which was already obvious to me was the norm. It was a little more crowded than the Milwaukee lakefront normally is during the summer, but not nearly so busy as the lakefront is during Milwaukee's festivals, particularly the ever-rocking Summerfest. We worked our way down toward the end of the Lake, where it flows into the Rhone, the river which will find its way to the Mediterranean in time. Talking, we took a series of particularly bad portraits of one another, often with either the imaginatively-named Jet d'Eau or the Old Town of Geneva in the background. Crossing the bridge to the festival grounds on the other side of the lake, we hit paydirt.

Erik had known that there was something going on, with some live music that we could check out. After pausing at an utterly vast candy vendor, we merged into a crowd that was dancing to enthusiastic and – as far as I can tell such things – very good Latino music of some sort. I don't know how to describe the varieties of music in this direction, and I didn't think to try to get the band's name. I was just too amazed to find this kind of music being done well in Geneva, with a vast and enthusiastic crowd enjoying it. I filmed a tiny bit of it, but gave that up to just enjoy it and dance along with the rest of the crowd. I don't know that Erik was as impressed as I was. He seemed a bit restless and I followed him around as he kept shifting through the crowd. I was enjoying the music, but was just as interested to merely keep talking with Erik, although now in January I cannot recall our conversations of that night. Inevitably there would be talk of women, faith, politics, and probably food. The only thing that really stands out in memory is us watching soldiers watching us closely from the Noga-Hilton doorway where we later learned some high-level Israeli leader was lodged. We did speak quite a bit of Geneva itself, with Erik coaching me about what to take in the next day. I think we turned in comparatively early, though, wiped out from our long weekend of travels to Venice, Florence and back, and our relative lack of sleep on the trains. I think I'd only slept five hours at best each night, even in Florence, because of excitement. So after a fairly conventional museum day for me, we crashed, with one big day of adventure left ahead of me, which turned out to unexpectedly be one of the best.


Go to: Geneva to Milwaukee: Part One: Walking Geneva

Sunday 23 July 2006
We made our way out of the Gallery at the Accademia after our encounter with Michelangelo's David, which had certainly taken me by surprise at the depth of emotion the thing had conjured out of me for being such a recognized image. Time was running away from us and our time with the David meant that I now had to sacrifice the next thing on my list, which was the Medici tombs by Michelangelo at San Lorenzo. I had put my last sprint of preparation into getting ready for that visit, reading a dense tome on their Neoplatonic iconographical content by the name of Michelangelo's Medici Chapel: A New Interpretation by one Edith Balas, even trying to process it when I would wake up in the night before I left. So that was a goner. But that was because I had something even more important to me to visit.


That something was Masaccio's The Holy Trinity. I wrote some about this earlier, before the trip, while preparing for what I would have the opportunity to see. Again, this one had grabbed my imagination as an undergrad, studying Renaissance history with Samuel Kinser. So we walked down past the giant block of the Palazzo Medici – another place I'd like to have gone in and explored – past San Lorenzo, and found ourselves in the thick of a street bazaar. I'm afraid that I'm no longer a marathoner, and the day had already left me exhausted, which leads to short-tempered grumpiness, as does having been disemboweled and left with a shortened digestive system. Erik wanted to pause and wander the bazaar, and because I was very eager to get to Santa Maria Novella, we split up at this point, with me annoyed at the prospect that Erik might not catch up to me at the church to see the fresco, which experience I was very eager to share with him.


We had seen Santa Maria Novella first of all the sights of Florence, because it is the first thing that you see as you come out of the train station, and it was in the shadow of the church that we had bought the cluster of huge grapes that had left me amazed at local agriculture when we arrived in the dark of Friday night. I had to divert to the train station to run to the restroon and so I ended up photographing the complex from the north. The actual grand façade and entrance is to the south, but that was covered over with scaffolding for restoration in the same way that Saint Peter's had been in Rome when Erik and I had been there for the Triduum in April 1998.


This actually turned into something of an advantage for me. I had read Timothy Verdon's article on the Trinity in The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio as part of my prep for the trip, (I now have my Introduction to Theology students read it with me as part of a triple-whammy I pull on them for appropriating Trinitarian theology and spirituality, with C.S. Lewis' Beyond Personality and selections from Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love) and I had learned from him that the main entrance of the time had been a portal on the east, directly facing the work, and it was now through a side door at almost this spot that tourists were now being admitted to the church while the restoration work was being conducted. This allowed me to initially experience the work as it was intended I should: with the maximization of its perspectival effect, which was utterly revolutionary at the time – this work is thus fairly considered one of the "starting points" of the Italian Renaissance – and the effect was apparent and effective the moment I walked through the entrance.


I ended up spending the bulk of the hour we had before Santa Maria was closed looking at the fresco from different distances and points. Erik came in behind me and wandered through the church for a time before joining me, where I whispered the story of the fresco and its significance to him. As the church was closing, he in turn took me quickly to see a few other highlights. I had already taken a few minutes to take in the Giotto crucifix I'd read about, and now Erik took me to see the windows celebrating the achievement and life of Thomas Aquinas, a particular point of pride for this Dominican church, the members of Thomas' own order.


All day, I'd been too consumed it seems, to make notes in my recorder. Now I began to try to take up the discipline again, but they were either sparse notes or overwhelming recordings. (In some ways, I'm at a loss to try to think of what it was that managed to fill my thoughts in an hour of studying the Pieta, the David, or now the Trinity. Even keeping a verbal recording probably would be only a fraction of what we would find if we could record our actual thoughts....)


+++

4:45pm
I finally made it to Masaccio’s Trinity. Hard going, but a bit of an adventure. Details I hadn’t noticed before, until now when I’m standing this close, as I’m standing right under it: halos around the Father and the Son, Mary and John …. Not a halo, but like rays of light coming from the mouth or the face of the dove of the Spirit, extending into the halo of Christ. Tongues of fire? Rays of light? Grace? Something going on there. The angles of the donors and the saints leading up to … Christ’s chest, I suppose, drawing attention maybe more to his face. The robustness of the Father, older but still not old: brown hair, like the Son – something you don’t see often at all.


They’ve made the sci-fi space of this as-yet-unrealized-in-real-life barrel vault ceiling into holy space. The technological, the artistic, architectural Renaissance turning into a holy location: a space in which God can be seen. Maybe too strong a celebration of the human mind? Or maybe an affirmation of natural theology and geometry.


“As you are now, I once was; as I am now, you will be.” The skeletal figure in the tomb beneath has a line with that. Obvious meaning, but ... Hm. Uncertain.


4:49pm
Masaccio’s Trinity still. Is God the Father on an altar? Or is the raised platform …? Hints of spaces out to either side in the barrel vault space that the Father, that the Trinity, occupies. Uncertain. Is it just a tool to get the Father in the right position, which keeps him as not a giant, but in the same proportions as everything else? So … a rejection of the Medieval, and a strict application of the perspective that Brunelleschi has taught him, perhaps?














+++

Again I made surreptitious photographs and movies of the fresco, here taking particular care to make sure there was no flash: I was infuriated by the idiots taking flash photography of the Sistine Chapel ceiling back in April 1998 as I sat there with the images. Also, I had no interest in getting thrown out, and I had no less than four workers standing behind me at the door and eyeing me suspiciously. For most frescos or paintings, I wouldn't have even bothered trying because the ones in print are of vastly better quality, having been done by professionals under controlled circumstances. But the Trinity suffers from a distinct lack of such good prints, even less of which have been copied onto the internet. So I decided to try on my own, but with middling success to say the least. I went with a very high speed shutter setting, to offset the automatic tendency to leave the shutter open longer because there was no flash. But even at my high-speed setting, the images tended to be blurry. The detail shot I had hoped for, looking at the halo interaction I spoke up above, between the Christ and the Spirit, came out with little of any such detail.

Afterwards, I glanced through a tourist goods booth outside, picking up a copy of the city guide that Erik had gotten the day before after we left the Uffizi, particularly for the removable map inside, of a type I found incredibly helpful when we were in Rome in '98. (And it's been helpful here in my recalling details as I write all this up.) I also continued in my buying postcards, one of which I was sending each day to my niece Grace with comments for a four-year-old to try to thrill or delight her, with some success (as I found out later when they arrived). Then Erik and I started heading east, with the goal of making the 6:00pm Mass at the Duomo, and now having added to that the decision to go in early for their 5:30pm Vespers service, partially because Vespers is just a freaking cool service, and partially so as to look around inside, since the interior tour of the Duomo was one of those things we had chosen to skip in order to emphasize other attractions.

A small group of people, perhaps a few dozen had gathered for Vespers. The door wardens tried to turn us away as tourists because it was time for services, and looked startled when we said we were there for Vespers. I wondered if that was a "youth" thing, but were weren't the only young people there. The Mass, though held in the opposite arm of the transept, was quite full with a normal-sized congregation.

+++
[5:43pm – 14 minute file of Erik and Mike chanting Vespers before Mass at the Duomo.]


[6:02pm – with violent, if subtle gestures, Erik indicates to Mike that he should also record the gorgeous-sounding Choir of English students who are singing for the Italian-language Mass at the Duomo. A 54 minute file of Mike and Erik trying to do their Mass responses in Italian is thus punctuated with lovely musical interludes.]


[6:56pm – a 3 minute file as Erik and Mike take in the choir’s gentle postlude, before beginning to exit, all the while taking their last, sneaky look-arounds the interior of the Duomo as the ushers try to get everyone out. We make a point of going over and thanking the students for their music.]

+++
As we prepared to exit the Duomo, we went over to where we could look to the far wall at the fresco of Dante and His Work by Domenico di Michelino, which I took this awfully weak (and, again, necessarily flashless) portrait shot of, with Erik standing with it. The photograph was a loss, but the glimpse was just one more tiny pleasure in a day filled with an overwhelming number of them. Then we turned for a last look at the interior of the Duomo, where I took the videos that are collected in the link to the right. (For some reason, however, a number of people are having trouble accessing videos I post to my LiveJournal ScrapBook; they're in one of the indicated formats, yet nevertheless the trouble persists.) We took a look around the interior of the dome and the altar space in the crossing where the transept crosses the nave. The space is almost impossibly lofty: in St. Peter's at the Vatican, the larger space under the dome is filled somewhat by the tall baldachin designed by Bernini, which perhaps interfered with the pure sensation of space that I felt here in the Duomo, the Saint Mary of the Flowers of Florence. After looking at what had been done in the main worship space (again, we had been sitting on the east side of the southern transept for Mass) we then said a few words of appreciation to the kids from the choir from England, and then headed out through the door on the south side of the nave.

Outside, we were a bit lost for our next Thing To Do. While dithering, we persuaded a reluctant man with whom we could not speak to take a portrait of us with the Duomo in the background, for which he went into the most horrible contortions in order to squat low against the ground and thus to get the dome into the picture. I'd love to have it and post it here, but I've yet to see any of Erik's shots from the trip, which I hope will be all fantastic, even it it means having to redesign all these pages. Finally we came to the amazing consensus that it was dinnertime. We walked south and west, through the less-impressive Piazza della Repubblica (less impressive for Florence, of course; it would be an amazing wonder in Milwaukee, which is already a pretty cool town, architecturally) and finally to a restaurant just down the street from the Hotel Torre Guelfa, where the street ends to face the church across the Piazza Santa Trinita. Erik at something a little more bold, as I recall, while I confined myself to the famed Minestrone of the city, which was a solid meal by itself, if a smaller one. It was fabulously thick and robust, far more stock than soup, as it were. Naturally this was augmented by some local red that I've forgotten, but which did its duty. We needed to be at the train station around 10:30pm to catch our night train back to Geneva, and so we determined that we would simply walk around and enjoy the city and its lights and views in the hour or two remaining to us after we finished eating.



This we did. I already don't remember much about what we said, or the exact route we took. Mostly we just meandered around this part of the river, before finally we turned our feet toward our palace home in Florence. The staff at the Hotel had been wonderfully gracious in allowing us to leave our bags at the Hotel, even though we had checked out that morning. That seals the deal for my being more than glad to return to enjoy their hospitality someday. We returned there to change from Church clothes (such as we managed: did I mention it was 100ºF in Florence this weekend?) to traveling clothes, pack our last purchases with the rest of our luggage, and once again haul the lot the 15-minute walk to the train station. I enjoyed being smug in recognizing the route backwards from the way we came to the Hotel on Friday night, while Erik increasingly insisted that we were going the wrong way. Everything was businesslike at the Stazione Centrale, and we were shortly boarded, departed, and before too long, asleep.


Go to: Return to Geneva

I know, I know ... it's completely absurd that I'm still typing up my travel journal from July. What else can I say except that it's been very busy since I got back? So, picking up from our last entry:

Sunday 23 July 2006
7:35am
I woke up around six. Couldn’t sleep. Tossed for probably close to an hour and then finally just decided to come up on the tower. I’ve been up here I-don’t-know-how-long, just watching the morning in Florence, getting up toward the tail end of the seven o’clock bells ringing for Mass at the Duomo and now and then an occasional bell across the city, and just watching the light change things. It’s kind of cloudy today, which will be a relief from the sunburn: I looked like a lobster yesterday afternoon. The sound of the air compressors, the occasional child crying, or a bird… the sounds of breakfast being made. Seems very quiet. Slight sounds of traffic on the other side of the Arno.


For the first time, I find myself desperately loving the idea of living here – for a while. I don’t know if the stuff I’ve read about the Florentine struggle for identity beyond that of the past is correct, but I know that there’s a life of the mind, of culture, here that isn’t just study, and isn’t the pretense of taking your spot with the giants of the past. That’s the real downside to our commercialization of art: to make the Greats different than they might have been in other ways. It’s the same thing that I’ve always said about music: just how recorded music makes us stop making music of our own. Families don’t make music so much anymore, and that used to be a commonplace, just a couple of generations ago.


There would be something about living here, in the light: you see so many more balconies and rooftop patios, chairs, sofas, beds…. People who enjoy living life on the rooftops with this view, this pulse or life of the city all open to them. The city itself is beautiful on a scale that I’ve never seen, maybe other than Rome. I suppose Venice had a different beauty, but there’s something that pulls me more to this.


But I would love – as I’m looking across the Arno at the balconies, right across from the tower here – what would it be like to come out to that one? Vines growing all around the door: just a little door, a little balcony, a little space, swathed in the greenery that livens a place up. It’s what I love so much about my Mom’s apartment: the way it’s a circle of green. This would be some kind of life for a while.

+++
Now, back in Milwaukee, months later, that moment still grabs my memory. It may seem nothing more than a daydream, but in that instant I made something of a resolution. Whether it's my first sabbatical as a professor somewhere, or even a summer break, I decided that I would come back to this city, to make up for the catastrophic error in judgment I made during my undergraduate by not doing any study abroad, that I would rent an apartment here for the summer and take in the city at its own pace. At least, at something approximating a native pace for someone who would still be some kind of tourist in disguise. That could be a lonely decision or resolution, but it's something I'd like to make happen.


I came downstairs after a time and rested a bit more and then, when Erik was up, I amused myself by shooting a little video of our room until we got ready for the day and rallied with a late breakfast in the airy dining room in the heart of our hotel, the Hotel Torre Guelfa. There we sat in the morning light coming through the broad windows that overlooked the courtyard of the old palazzo. We exchanged brief words of planning our day as we drank our coffee or juice, and shortly we left, saying a few brief words of farewell to Miss Sarojini, who I found had come in after us and was quietly eating by herself behind me.


Soon we were walking up the Arno, past the Uffizi, working our way toward our first goal of the day, which was to pay our respects by making a quick pilgrimage to the tomb of Michelangelo at the FranciscanBasilica di Santa Croce di Firenze. Walking through the arches of the Medici family's old elevated walkway that stretches from the Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Vecchio just begs for photography play, and so I tried catching Erik on the move. I'm sure that I could have done better in trying to pose him, but this wasn't so high on our list of priorities. We looked at the street merchants already hard at work along that stretch, but once we got east of the museum the crowd thinned out considerably and became primarily composed of people who appeared to be locals. We were taken at this point by the sight of a middle-aged-to-elderly man who passed us on the river itself, rowing up the Arno with slow and steady strokes. I think we both were curious just to observe people who lived here – who interacted with this grand city as a matter of normality – and who didn't share our gaping interest as students or tourists. Somewhere along the river stretch we thus also find ourselves peering into the yard of some elegant building through the gated, fenced, and pillared wall fronting the street, trying to get a feel for the building within, which surely must have shared the poise of its exterior. Turning up the Via de Benci, and pausing to enjoy the architecture of the building farther on that coped with the splitting of the street, we came to the busy Piazza Santa Croce, which had been set up with risers for some sort of outdoor concert or spectacle. Before heading into the church itself, we paid homage to the Poet, in the form of a great, even epic, statue in front of the Basilica. Dante, it seems to me, holds a place in Erik's heart and mind similar to that which Michelangelo has come to hold for me. It's a love I've tried to share, but I have repeatedly found The Divine Comedy hard going, and as yet not a natural taste. But I can obviously intellectually appreciate his contributions and achievements, and so could "behave in church" while Erik wanted to stop and consider the image of the writer. Then we turned and entered the Basilica.



Santa Croce is actually something of a reservoir of grand tombs, as following the link above will let you see. Beyond the tomb of Michelangelo, there was a monument to Dante, though his actual tomb is in Ravenna, if I recall correctly, and later we would go over to pay our respects at the tomb of Galileo Galilei as well. But first it was the tomb of Michelangelo that took my attention. As tombs go today, of course, it's pretty grand, with an admirable bust of the artist crowning the whole monument. But in my head I was comparing it to the Pieta we had visited the day before, which is what he himself had intended for his own tomb, before the fault in the stone caused him to surrender that project. Obviously, I think that even the unfinished statue commands the same respect as any finished work, but there he perhaps also profits from the overall status his name has kept through the centuries: what he considered his failures and his trash are today priceless to us.


So that was the surface reaction, or the reaction to the physical tomb itself. Beyond that, I don't know what to say I felt or thought, if I was feeling or thinking anything in particular. Mostly, I guess I was just actively being aware of what this man's life and work had come to mean to me over the years, and even across the centuries that separate his artistic environment from my own, although his is one of the many roots or foundations of mine. When Michael McGlinn and I were just getting to know one another, maybe actually in the process of the initial recording session for Life and Other Impossibilities, we discovered this mutual love for Michelangelo's work and talked about it at some point. In Christianity, the doctrines of Creation – that God is responsible for and the origin of everything in the universe, particularly humanity, and endows it all with His own fundamental Goodness – and of the Incarnation – that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth – both end up granting the most outrageously positive, even exalted, vision of humanity: greater, I think, than any other system of thought in human history. In Michelangelo's work there is an expression of this theology, especially in his earlier years (works like the Last Judgment I'm not so sure of in this regard), that gives the viewer a chance to step somewhat into this God's-eye vision of the glory of humanity. Or perhaps it's to recognize in humanity that vision of God's Glory that we call the imago Dei: the "image of God" in the human race. Michelangelo has thus been a key theologian for my theological anthropology since my undergraduate, well before I realized I had a "theological anthropology."

Beyond the memorial to Michelangelo, we were able to see the one the Florentines erected to their own exiled Dante, but Erik was frustrated in his attempts to get any closer to it by the strict limits to how far tourists were able to enter into the church if not taking part in services. We were kept to a pretty confined area in the rear of the building, and so a respectful examination from a distance was the best we could do: our photographs would allow us to come closer than our eyes actually did, which was disappointing when you were actually there. Prevented by the distance from looking at the memorial in detail, we drifted off to the other side of the church where we looked at Galileo's tomb. Galileo is both a fascination and an irritant for me. Historically, it's an interesting case highlighting the shifts in scientific philosophy, even though in many ways it's just a follow-up to the real work and breakthroughs which had already been done by Father Copernicus. At the same time, it seems that the inquiries under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition are so blown out of any relation to reality in order to support modern myths of an epic confrontation of "Science versus Religion." This isn't borne out, as far as I can tell, when I go back and read the actual documents relating to the case. The Aristotelian "Scientific Establishment" seems to be the major mover behind the controversy, from what I've seen, making it a conflict within the contemporary scientific community: a conflict over competing methodologies of presenting scientific evidence. But that's so less interesting and ideologically useful today than to perpetuate this "science versus religion" duality. And of course the presence of "the Inquisition," which no one can be bothered to learn about and see as other than a conspiratorial bunch of irrational religious fanatics on a quest to oppose all truth and justice, as opposed to a normal investigative and juridical body such as we have in all societies, with just the same potential for being co-opted and abused as all our court systems, as happened in Spain with the infamous "Spanish Inquisition" under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Anyway. People so often have a non-historical Galileo in their heads – one determined so much more by contemporary drama or fiction than history – that I never know quite who it is that I'm dealing with when that name is brought up. This is very irritating to an historian, and will continue to be as I morph into a grumpy old man over the years. I mistook the decorations around the tomb as being part of the tomb schema for awhile before Erik made me look more closely at them and I realized that it seemed to be some older art that had been uncovered from behind Galileo's tomb.


After this we left the Basilica and began walking across the city toward the Accademia. We had only made it to the other side of the piazza before we stopped at a shop and were looking at t-shirts and such. I picked up a tiny Italia team t-shirt for Haley – I have no idea why I didn't think to pick up a larger one as a present for Grace, who actually plays soccer in a league for four-year-olds – and Erik laughed and told me about the crazed excitement he'd seen days earlier when Italy won the World Cup against France. Even to my own eye, Venice and Florence were still bubbling with excitement and pride over the victory. Erik looked at a cheerfully semi-obscene chef's apron featuring the nude torso of the David superimposed over the chef's own and laughed at the thought of wearing that as a gag. Then we were again threading our way through the streets on our way to the Accademia. At one point, we came around a corner to a view of the Duomo behind us which again made us start in a kind of shock at the sheer size of it: I had never gotten that feel from photographs of it. But when you suddenly find it right there, the effect is striking. So that ended up being worth a few shots as we paused to study it as it was framed by the buildings on the street.


So, we continued up the via del Servio toward the statue of a mounted figure framed against the arched columns behind it, where it emptied suddenly out into a piazza in front of the university, I think: a large rectangular space partially littered with staging and dumpsters from some event that looked to have already happened. We veered off to the left and got a bit confused – my fault – about which building was the Accademia, walking all around the piazza in front of San Marco's church before we realized we'd walked right past it as we'd entered the square. We figured out where to enter, finally, and got in on time.


We made our way through the collection pretty quickly. Michelangelo's David was high on Erik's list of Must-See sights of Florence. Myself, I had been more-or-less indifferent to the idea. There were other, less well-known things than the David that I wanted to see, and I had privately felt that if this got squeezed off of our list, it wouldn't be any great loss to me, given how much I had seen it and read about it in books.


Was I ever wrong on that one.


We ended up walking around it, studying it from different angles, talking quietly about it, for at least an hour. Again, like what I wrote above about the effect of suddenly coming upon the Duomo, there was in the David a sense of scale that by itself could surprise and command respect. I hadn't really noticed this with the replica of the statue that stands in its original space in the Piazza Signoria in front of the Palazzo Vecchio when we stood there yesterday, but I wasn't really paying attention to it. Perhaps here, too, in this space designed for it and dominated entirely by it, the effect is calculated to achieve that overwhelming awareness. I knew it was a particularly large piece of marble, having read about it as I said before, but it was much larger than I'd imagined, and the picture here of Erik standing in front of it might convey that sense of scale better than any description I could attempt.


There were details I'd never quite seen before, like the way the sling curves all the way around his body and how the right hand is already armed with a rock in the cup of the weapon. We talked about the hands and the head, the way that they're slightly out of proportion and larger than the rest of the figure, and the understood symbolism of this: that it is these things the head and the hands, the mind and the creativity powers of humanity that are being emphasized in Michelangelo's giddy Renaissance, where for the first time the achievements of the Romans are being excelled and people begin to look toward the future rather than the past for humanity's potential. We checked on the proportions, just to make sure that we understood this correctly, and I had Erik surreptitiously stand briefly in similar pose so that I could compare their right hands.


It was with equal surreptitiousness that I snapped these photographs from the other side of the David. The staff was raining death down on any photographers, and I certainly would never use a flash on such objects because I understand the destructive power of even those lights. So, without a flash, I palmed the camera and took a series of shots. Erik was using film, so I was the go-to guy for just filling up camera memory, especially since I was loaded for bear with two 2GB memory cards. Even taking lots of little 30-second videos as I did, I still didn't get to the second card until my last day of the trip. Erik and I had moved over to this side of the statue so that we could study his face, trying to maneuver ourselves into his line of sight, as it were. The emotion came out more strongly than I would have guessed. Fixed by that titanic glare, Erik finally said, after a silence, "That's the Eye of the Tiger, there."


Precisely. The outrage that David felt at the spiritual and national insult of Goliath – and the resolution to do something about it – was captured in that twist of the head and the glare that almost seemed focused on us, now.

David said to the Philistine, "You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the LORD will hand you over to me, and I'll strike you down and cut off your head. Today I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel. All those gathered here will know that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves; for the battle is the LORD's, and he will give all of you into our hands." (1 Samuel 17: 45-47)

So, beyond the historical David himself, whether the work represents the human spirit, or perhaps the Florentine spirit more specifically, there was now a sense of the danger as well as achievement to the human being, too: what we do has consequences; it matters.


Go to: Florence: Day Two, Part Two

Now, I'm not holding my breath that these are the actual remains of Paul of Tarsus. (Although there's reasonable evidence for the authentic tomb of Peter to have been excavated in modern times from the ancient cemetery the Vatican was built upon.) But it is going to be an interesting find for early Christian archaeology if this is even just finding the original monument Roman Christians built to the memory of Paul.

Vatican Unearths Apparent Tomb of Paul
Dec 11, 3:40 PM (ET)

By DANIELA PETROFF

VATICAN CITY (AP) - A white marble sarcophagus believed to be the final resting place of St. Paul has been unearthed from beneath the altar of Rome's second-largest basilica after centuries hidden from view, but those curious about its contents will have to wait still longer.

( Read more... )

Florence, Saturday 22 July 2006 Continued
(Actually 12:37am Sunday, recording.)

We made our way around the south side of the Duomo, pausing along the way to study the details of the façade on the church itself and on the tower next to it that had been designed by Giotto. Erik, as I had learned when we were at San Marco in Venice, was particularly enamoured of the open corners of such buildings, where two wings – or in this case the nave and the transept – come together. The multiple planes coming together at these points, with its intersections of lines, surfaces and textures, made such angles architecturally exciting for him, he explained to me. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I could see what he meant about a kind of visual busyness to such areas of a building that the broader surfaces lacked.

So we made it over to the Museum of the Duomo, where we soaked in the originial Ghiberti panels to the Baptistery doors we had just been studying. We moved through the first several rooms somewhat leisurely, looking at medieval detailwork that had been taken down from the façade of the Cathedral for its protection, and working our way to the panels, which are displayed in the old courtyard of the building, which used to be the workshop of the church. Now the courtyard is roofed over in glass, but the space is still preserved. It was in this courtyard that Michelangelo had spent two years carving a giant, oft-rejected block of marble into his masterful David, which was still on our list to see. It is a different treasure of his, though, a Pieta, that is, a work with the subject of Christ’s body after his crucifixion, that is now one of the chief attractions of this museum. But now, along with the panels for Ghiberti’s Baptistery doors, the courtyard is given over to a lesser-known work from the Baptistery (like the door panels, now replaced at the Baptistery by replicas), a statue set portraying Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. Erik and I were both unexpectedly drawn to this, and spent more time standing there, talking about it, and pointing out details and ideas to one another. The sculptor was Andrea Sansovino, who I don’t know that I’d ever heard of before. I found myself most taken by the humanity of Jesus as he was portrayed in his baptism. In particular, it was the way he held his hands that added such humanity to his facial expression, giving a sense of being profoundly moved by the spiritual experience he is undergoing, and – given what is related in the text of the Father speaking His approval and of the Spirit coming upon Jesus – a sense of a powerful intimacy with God being consumated. After that welcome surprise, we went in search of our intended goal.



We spent a long time with Michelangelo’s Pieta there, the one he had intended for his own tomb, and that I think was a huge influence on Ivan Mestrovic’s Pieta at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame. Erik gave me a lot of time there, for which I was very grateful. This Pieta was up near the top of my Must-See list while we were in Florence, and so I first just sat off to the side of it for a time. I’m not sure if I can explain why I find it so compelling. The biographical edge certainly has some draw: like Mozart’s Requiem, you can’t help but feel intrigued by one of our greatest artist’s work as they labour at the close of life, with a vision of death and that horizon drawing near, with all if its ultimate questions and implications coming more into focus.

I know that, like Mestrovic’s Pieta, I’m utterly captivated by the hooded male figure at the summit of the statue. The written guide here described that figure as Nicodemus, from the Gospel of John, chapter 3, and said that Michelangelo had carved that figure as a self-portrait. Certainly, that seemed arguable, looking at the figure, and fit into a long tradition of Christian artists contemplating their lown lives in the light of the events of the Crucifixion, such as Rembrant’s memorable painting himself into a scene as one of the soldiers crucifying Christ and raising the cross. What didn’t make sense to me was the identification of the figure as Nicodemus. That just sounds like people who have done a sloppy job of researching the scene. Rather, it makes perfect sense to me that this figure would represent Joseph of Arimathea, the Sanhedrin member who – like Nicodemus – was a secret follower of Jesus’ despite being a member of this supreme court and council of the Jewish leadership that had pushed for his execution. It was Joseph of Arimathea who had Jesus buried in the nearby tomb he had recently had made for himself, given that the Sabbath was quickly drawing near and there was relatively little time left for the preparation of the body for burial. In some ways, those details seem to have little to do with the statue itself, but it does seem important that if we’re going to understand a work like this – particularly one where there’s something of a self-portrait involved as well – then it is important to correctly identify the role in which Michelangelo has cast himself.


What would Joseph of Arimathea represent here? A man who serves Christ however he can? Who honours him in face of disapproval? Or is Joseph seen as doing too little, too late? Could it be a self-critical role regarding his faith that Michelangelo admits to in this stone? Or is Joseph seen as offering a tenderness in begging Jesus’ body from Pilate, and burying him as a man of status, treating his body with honour in mourning, and embalming him in around 125 pounds of spices and ointments? The role of Joseph can be read a number of different ways, clearly, and perhaps even reading Michelangelo’s letters where he deals with his own spiritual life will not help us overcome this inherent ambiguity.

What do we see from the work itself? As I began to circle the statue, studying it from different angles, occasionally photographing certain details (without a flash, of course), sometimes with a quiet suggestion from Erik, I considered the evidence of the work itself. First off, the statue is obviously not at Michelangelo’s tomb. A flaw in the rock suddenly sent a limb flying off and the Master had to give up the work. He gave the remaining pieces to a student of his, who repaired the break, and who further finished the figure one of the women – perhaps Mary Magdalene? – who completes the quartet portrayed. The mood strikes me as one of tenderness. There’s great power in the figure I’m now calling Joseph, and great strength to him in lowering the body. Jesus’ muscular figure is literally a dead weight for the other three to bear, and we can see this quite easily: he sags awkwardly, but the three are entirely focused on supporting him. Their concern grants the dead body dignity. Or perhaps they recognize a dignity that is still retained in spite of the ignominy of death. The dichotomy of death – that the dead one is both present and lost – is captured in their obvious concern and attention to Christ’s body, and in this Michelangelo captures one of the most elementally human moments of our existence: in the incomplete, unfulfilled way we all relate to our dead. Death is the ultimate frustration for human relationship, and the death of Christ is the ultimate experience of death for all humanity. Christ’s death acknowledges the utter brokenness of love and relationship in the face of death. It is God’s being victimized by this loss with us. If God can die, we know that the loss we experience in death is true loss indeed. The Resurrection will break this loss, and announce the immanent death of death itself, when God shows us that His true Love is stronger than true death. But this is all in the unknown and uncertain future from the perspective of the Pieta, and the pure freedom of Jesus’ divinity seems here to have been finally bounded and shattered. The Pieta dwells in that moment, forever. It is perhaps one of our greatest artistic testaments to both the power of death and its constant, ongoing tension with the power of human life and love for those living who, for their time, stand over and against death as its witnesses.


When I finally tore myself away from the Pieta, Erik and I made our inevitable concession to the swift flow of our very limited time and did a quick walk-through the remainder of the Museum, “sampling” again, in hope of some future leisurely return, the extensive and interesting displays on the construction of the Duomo. We then stepped back out into the brutal heat and light and walked down the street to the Uffizi, for which we had 2pm entry tickets. Along the way we got into a conversation about Freud and Erik took me to task for speaking too glibly about him, looking at his shortcomings or bad ideology to the exclusion of his real breakthroughs for Psychology as a discipline. Chastened, I listened closely to what he had to say, and acknowledged the sense of it, embarrassed to have been caught speaking in sophomore mode. That topic was quickly forgotten when we arrived at the Uffizi. There we hit especially the Botticelli, the Leonardo, the Michelangelo painting there, and seeing some of the Raphels, especially the portrait of Pope Julius II that I know well. But especially the Botticellis, I think, is where we both really lit up. I liked seeing the Caravaggios on our way out, but I was absolutely exhausted by the end of that, with my feet absolutely killing me, and wanting nothing better than coming back and crashing at the hotel for a little while, which we did. I took a nap then, while Erik went up and sat in the afternoon sun on top of the tower.

Obviously, one of the great museums of the world like the Uffizi was going to be a place where we had to compromise on what we would take the time to see and on what we would either skip or skim. Like a lot of people, then, we focused in on the Big Names, but there were a number of classics by figures like Piero della Francesca that I had studied in the past that made the walk to the great figures of the High Renaissance just as enjoyable. I had to leave Erik for a while in order to walk to near the end of the Museum so that I could take a bathroom break, and only afterwards did I realize that we had been a bit too vague on where we would meet or how we would find one another after I returned. It was while doing this that I got to enjoy a lot of the 14th and 15th century material I referred to just above, finally giving up on trying to find Erik so much as just assuming that I would run into him in the crowd. It was then that I walked into the single room containing all of the great Botticelli’s of the Uffizi’s collection, where Erik happened to be. But at first I didn’t notice him because I was so taken with what I had found. I was long familiar with Sandro Botticelli’s work: he had reigned for quite a while as my favourite artist before losing that status to Michelangelo in more recent years. And so walking into a room that had four Madonnas of his, along with The Birth of Venus and Primavera, wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t seen before. But the thing was, I hadn’t seen these before, not with my own eyes. And I never knew that the paintings were such large ones, the sheer size of the canvases coming as something of a shock. But while the bulk of the crowds were gathered around The Birth of Venus and Primavera, as perhaps the most well-known and most-reproduced of his works, I instead found myself absolutely smitten with his Madonnas.



I knew that his Annunciation was a favourite of mine: no surprise there. But suddenly, finding myself surrounded by the large canvases, I found myself entranced. A slow, huge grin spread over my face: I could feel it, and I knew that I probably looked a bit silly, but I didn’t care. Something about her, as she was caught in all the elegance that Botticelli could give her, just overwhelmed me. It was almost like falling in love, or perhaps more like a crush, or maybe even more of walking into a room and discovering the one you love when you didn’t know they were going to be there. The dance-like movement of her humility in front of the angel in the Annuciation, or the intricate and light detailwork of the halos that crowned her in Magnificat Madonna or Madonna of the Pomegranate: all of this somehow added up to a reaction of pure joy that I’d never quite experienced from a painting before, and certainly hadn’t expected. And to look up and suddenly spot Erik moving over toward me with what looked to be the very same goofy grin plastered all over his face was all the more fun – and reassuring – in seeing that he got it, too, whatever exactly this was. It was kind of like seeing grace for the first time, without distraction or worry: just seeing it for the sheer abandom of its own gratuity. We couldn’t help but just laugh for the joy being conveyed in it.



Julie Riederer had passed through a few weeks earlier and had prevailed upon me to try to open myself up to her favourite of the lot – Primavera – but I’m afraid that, as before, the painting didn’t really appeal to me in any serious way. I tried, but after the experience we had been having on the other side of the room, I remained indifferent by comparison.

I was immensely satisfied some minutes later to discover a treasure I'd forgotten was in the Uffizi, so caught up had I been in the experience of the Botticelli painting, and so fixated before arriving in Florence on seeing the Pieta: this treasure was another vision of the angel Gabriel's announcing to Mary that she will bear the Christ child – a painting I had come to know in my undergraduate Renaissance studies, but which affected me very differently than my later delight in Botticelli's Annunciation. This was Leonardo’s Annunciation. There is a mathematical perfection in this painting that I sense but cannot articulate or explain, and to me it feels like grace, in some form of God’s own perfection. It was immensely satisfying to stand in front of that old favourite for some time. I was also surprised by how powerful I found his Saint Jerome in person. Michelangelo’s painting of The Holy Family came as a bit of a surprise in that I had had the impression that the work – which was another one of these surprisingly large canvases – was painted on the inside of a bowl or some kind of dish. So that reinforced for me the difference between the kind of mistakes that can creep into “book-education” that actually going off and seeing things with your own eyes does not so easily allow for.



As we moved around the hall from one wing of the building to the next, and we paused to look out the windows down the Arno and over the Ponte Vecchio, we randomly ran into the two girls from Korea who had shared our room on the night train down to Venice. So I spoke a few words to the one who spoke English better and laughed about it being a small world, at least for tourists.


After a bit of a rest, then, we just followed our noses across the rive in search of a place to have dinner. We took it slow across the Ponte Vecchio, looking at this striking and famed architecture of the storefronts that stretch the length of the bridge. The length, that is, except for the center, on which there’s a small piazzo of sorts, and here Erik and I stopped for a bit to listen to a pair of guitarists playing to a decent-sized crowd out for the evening. We listened to the Neil Simon-sounding guy with harmonies being sung by the Elvis Costello-looking guy as they sang Dylan songs and such. But they were pretty good performers and so we just took in the music and the social street life for a few songs’ worth. When we finally began to move on we were no more than a block into the buildings on the other side of the river when we ran into Sarojini again, the young American we had met the previous night up atop our palazzo’s tower. We compared some notes of where we had gone and what we had seen during the day. She was just heading back toward the hotel, having just eaten, if I recall correctly, but when we invited her to join us for the conversation at least, once again she seemed to quickly become very guarded, if polite, and declined. Shrugging that loss off once we moved on, we quickly began to sense that the restaurant pickings were rather slim on the route we were taking, up the Via de’ Guicciardini. After going on a few more blocks, past the imposing Palazzo Pitti, we turned down a lane that opened on our right, the Via Mazzetta, and began to head back closer to the river. As the street became the promisingly-named Via Santo Agostino, it opened onto a large piazza, which turned out to be the Piazza Santo Spirito, in front of the church of that same name.

We found a promising-looking place doing good business that had a lot of outdoor seating about halfway down the piazza toward the church. There were a number of such places, all doing a lively business in the warm night. There were also several dozen people in sight, standing or sitting in the area of the steps before S. Spirito, talking, listening to music, or looking for adventure. It took a while for us to get served once we were seated, which we found a bit odd, but we set to with gusto. I tried one of the classic dishes the article on food in my Insight Guide had mentioned, the Steak Florentine. I can’t say that the steak struck me in any way as being particularly distinct in itself, although I don’t think I’m as sensitive to differences in the quality of meats as my Dad is, or someone like Markus Wriedt. What I did notice was the rock salt that the steak had been cooked with: failing to brush all that off could result in a real surprise if you bit down on one of these pebbles. They dissolved quickly, but they didn’t chew well at all. Erik had a horrifying dish of prawns (prawn?), sort of a large crayfish-kind of critter that, as he finished with the edible parts, he arranged as marching over and attacking my plate. I clearly was horrified enough at their appearance to make that a worthwhile exercise. I had a good half-bottle of Badia a Coltibuono Chianti Classico – very sweet – and I’m starting to sober up here, as I recite all of this. Fast metabolism: get tipsy quick and sober up quick, but as soon as I’m done cleaning up we’ll go up atop the palazzo again and sit and look at Florence at night and continue our talk. We had some great conversation, though, that I suppose that we couldn’t have had with a guest, laughing at old stories and stuff like that. Strangely, I cannot quite recall any specifics at the moment, but they were worth lot of laughing out loud.

So we walked back, enjoying the lights on the river, watching the nightlife, with occasionally stunning-looking young Italian couples moving from club to club, and pausing to grab some gelato while we talked. We walked past Santo Spirito as we left the restaurant. It’s a startlingly different-looking building compared to the other major churches of Florence. Although old enough that its dome was also done by Brunelleschi, like the Duomo’s, its façade is a bare white, with attractively-sloping edges that give it much more the appearance of a Mexican church to my eye, speaking more of the 19th century desert missions to me, than of the Italian Renaissance. It’s too bad we didn’t get a chance to really explore it: what little I’ve read about it calls its interior architecture one of the best of the Renaissance’s.

12:58am

It’s about one o’clock in the morning, and I’m up on top of the tower on the palazzo. I wish I could get a picture of this tower. I wonder what it looks like, honestly. I’m on the inside looking out and don’t really have any sense of quite where it is that I am. I’m looking out over Florence at 1am – the highlights lit up: the Palazzo Vechio, and the Duomo; I can see very clearly the Baptistery, where some of the roofs slope down. The Uffizi is a dark ridge to my east, of high walls…. The palazzo up on the hill – I can’t remember the name of it, the Pizzi? Or no, that’s the other thing over there, very big… a substantial art museum; Erik and I walked past it earlier tonight on our way looking for food. And there’s the tower that’s over by – or is – Santo Spirito: there seem to be two churches jammed into one another, one very Mexican-looking, very plain and unadorned, naked white walls with absolutely no decoration or features or ornamental façade whatsoever. And then there’s a tower that’s clearly older and more in the European tradition, and a dome over there.

So Erik and I came stumbling back over the bridge, the Ponte Santa Trinita. Or at least I came stumbling back because I’m such a lightweight: half a bottle of Chianti and I was flying for a while, there. But that’s the benefits of a high metabolism: quick tipsyness and pretty quick recovery. So quiet. I was too wiped to come up here with Erik earlier. I could barely open my eyes. Took a nap for about an hour after we got back from the Uffizi, and talked for a while. But I’m glad we did so. A good talk: a real heart-to-heart. Old friendship and personality issues, things that need to be dealt with in order to keep the friendship solid, I think. And now, oh, I wish I could photograph this city at night from up here! All these shades of dim light, lighting up all the sides of the buildings between me and the Duomo, which I’m looking at now. I turned back from the river to that, and just the geometry of the maze of these streets…!


It was very hard-going today. We did about half of what I hoped to knock off on Saturday, with our Baptistery-Duomo-Museum-Uffizi loop. I had also intended to put San Lorenzo in there, with the Medici Chapel, so I suppose it was more than half, but still: that’s a big sacrifice. I hope we can work it in tomorrow. I want to do that, and I want to do the Santa Maria Novella, because I absolutely have to see the Masaccio Holy Trinity. I’ve studied it for so many years – it’s made such an impression on my imagination over the years – but it looks like most things are open only from 1pm to 5pm on Sunday, is all. We’re here through 11:30pm before our train heads back to Geneva. We didn’t make the Mass today. We were just getting out of the Uffizi at 5pm when there’s a Mass in English at the Duomo on Saturday night. So maybe we’ll take one in in the morning, and then we have tickets at the Galleria dell’Accademia for 12:30pm. So maybe that would allow for Mass, and then the Academy, and then Santa Maria Novella if it comes down to a choice, and then back to San Lorenzo. We’ve also got to try to make arrangements for our bags, since I suppose we’re supposed to be out of here by noon or something like that. I hope the management here will be flexible enough to let us store our bags for a little while. [They were.] If not, we’ll have to trudge them over to the train station, which fortunately is right next to Santa Maria Novella, leave them there, and then go over to the church, I guess. And, as Erik said, if everything is closed at 5pm, and we’re leaving at 11:30, then we can walk around for six hours, and have a good dinner in there somewhere, and so forth.

Wow. I don’t know that I captured this view on the movie that I just took with my camera. I’m certainly not going to capture it here. There’s a quiet to this place at night: a stillness that certainly does not belong to the day, and the immense crowds walking through the streets. I was surprised to see how commercial the streets are down here, on this map with all these medieval buildings and palazzos which are in fact now all opened up with storefronts. If nothing else, it seems that along with the identity of a “museum town” here in the city center, they must do very well as a commercial town. But the article I read about Florence seeking its current identity, of being defined by the past and the confusing or frustration that comes with that, certainly makes sense.

So, I’m going to turn this off and just quit. I’m looking down west, down the line of the Borgo S. Apostoli street we’re on, where there’s a nook where we finally found the Apostoli church that was founded by Charlemagne around 800, although the current building is later than that. But certainly it’s an earlier one: none of the Renaissance flourishes. So. ‘Til tomorrow, I guess. Wow. So beautiful.


2:09 am

Holy cow, what a night! By the clock on the Palazzo Vecchio, it is ten after two. I have been talking – I was doing that entry about Venice – with a fellow by the name of Frank Esposito, of www.frankesposito.com – Artistic Landscaping – from Long Island who just strolled up to the top of the tower while I was recording an entry. He and I sat up here for at least an hour and had a great talk about art and what it means: art in the lives of ordinary people. That is, how art’s not supposed to be this professionalized thing of "the high-and-mighty artist," with the hoi polloi who don’t get anything; the truth is that you can watch all the people going into the museums here and sense or see something of what they are taking from this stuff. I had a blast talking to this guy! Great guy.

So he’s … what? a forty-four year-old guy from Long Island and he’s here – how cool is this? – taking a two-week class over in Tuscany; painting, working on his oil painting on the side, and always trying to think of ways to bring the personal fine art that he’s doing on the side over and into the business of his landscaping art. He had a couple of days off on the weekend, so he’s over here in Florence looking around. This was one of the great conversations. I always think that, when traveling to another country, the thing that really makes it a great experience is being able to talk to the real people there (meaning not the people just dealing with you through the tourism industries). I miss it when I stay in hotels, as opposed to staying with families, like the chances I’ve had in Tunisia and Ireland. But this was one of those great conversations that – hey, the guy may have been from Long Island instead of Florence – but it really helped make this experience of Florence. Fantastic!


Go to: Florence: Day Two, Part One

Florence, Sunday 23 July 2006, 12:27am

It's been difficult to get time to actually make a journal entry. I think the last one was just dealing with just our morning walking around Venice, and now I've been in Florence for a day. Some of the highlights... wow. Well, right from the beginning. We arrived after dark, around 10pm on Friday, and walked about 15 minutes to get to our hotel, the Hotel Torre Guelfa, in the 13th century Palazzo Acciaiuoli, originally the home of the Prime Minister of the King of Naples. We stopped at a vendor across from the train station, under the shadow of the church of Santa Maria Novella – the visiting of which was at the highest level of my goals for the trip – and Erik bought a large bunch of green grapes. In fact, we were rather stunned: they were the largest grapes I had ever seen in my life, more round than oblong, and around the size of a half-dollar. Already Tuscany was making a lushly rich impression. Dropping off our bags in our room, we climbed up the 13th-century tower to the roof of our Palazzo and took in the view of the city at night. Absolutely stunning. Gorgeous. Erik and I were both almost giggling in our delight with the view, as we could see major landmarks like the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo all lit up and dominating the night. The open rooftop of the Palazzo is set up as a deck and wine bar for the guests of the hotel with small wrought-iron chairs and tables, and is on two levels. After our initial look-around and exclamations, we climbed the curved outer staircase to the highest level of the tower. There we had a fun, unexpected conversation with a girl our age we found sitting in the darkness there, and whose solitude I was afraid we had interrupted. She turned out to be an American, with the distinct and exotic Sanskrit name of Sarojini, made the more so because she looked to be of European stock, as far as I could see in the dark: but I just love that kind of creativity with names. As we introduced ourselves, I learned that she was about to start a research grant in economics in New Haven, but was for the moment touring Italy by herself. As we began talking about our reasons for coming to Florence, I found that she and I had a lot of similar ideas regarding art, and there was such a strong resonance that Erik began to think that there was more of a connection being made than there was and excused himself for the night. In fact, I think this actually slightly alarmed the poor woman, and there was an awkward lull before things picked up again. It was a shame, though, because I had very much been enjoying talking with her until she became more guarded. After a while I simply excused myself and gave her her privacy again only to return to my room and have Erik berate me as a coward from the shower. I stole his grapes and tried to practice patience.


This morning, then, we set out north for the Duomo. We didn't have far to walk, but as we tried to figure out the streets, we looped around and, seeing some space back south, came into the Piazza della Signoria from the north. We were now facing the Palazzo Vecchio diagonally across the square and taking it in with all the crowds around us. The Palazzo has pretty much always been the civic center of the city of Florence, at times the palace of the Duke of Florence, when there were such, and even now the meeting place of the city council. We made our way over to the entrance, where Michelangelo's David ruled as the embodiment of Florentine civic pride, although now its place is held by a replica so as to protect the original from the weather. Erik was very much focused on the David's place before the building, which didn't surprise me, because I knew that that was at the top of his list of must-see wonders of the city. I followed him over, after haggling with a vendor about camera batteries, and took in the row of statues along the front of the building, along with those statues to the south of the Piazza, sheltering in an open-faced Gothic structure called the Loggia dei Lanzi. I was immediately taken with Cellini's bronze Perseus, holding aloft the head of the Gorgon Medusa, an image immediately and vividly recognizable to me from repeated childhood viewings of Clash of the Titans. I was also somehow just sort of interested in the crowd, and in particular Erik, watching him take it all in. We moved along the line of the statues in front of the palace, all of which seemed to pale next to even the copy of the David, which got me thinking about whether I was thinking that because I really thought there was some intrinsic power to the statue – it was much farther down the list of Things To See for me than it was for Erik – or whether it was simply the familiarity of that piece of art that gave it that influence. It hasn't escaped me that even a pretty bad song or singer that the record companies back strongly can become a hit, or that a man or woman who becomes a film or television star gains a kind of beauty in people's eyes because of the way their image is given to us over and over again, even if they would have simply been seen as less remarkable had you simply known them as working at the local grocery store.


Moving away from the last of the statues, we headed north again up the Via del Calzaiuoli and soon came to the Duomo, the Cathedral church of Santa Maria del Fiore. We were walking up the street and, just around the corner of the last shops on the block, it suddenly appeared on our right, like this sudden iceberg. I had an image in my head of the watchman on the Titanic gripped with the dismay of knowing that what appeared out of the mist at that last minute was too huge to do anything about. I could not believe the sheer size of the thing. I had the same experience with the sudden appearance of Skellig Michael, back in '99 when I rented that spot on the fishing boat in the Atlantic off of County Kerry in Ireland. The Skellig was hidden behind the cabin for the whole trip out there as I sat on a box toward the stern, until suddenly it came around the right edge of the cabin or wheelhouse like this exotic nightmare, absolutely stunning, appalling in its size and majesty, and there was something of the same hugeness of the Duomo today. I sat down, then, and spent a few minutes just taking in its sheer presence, as Erik confessed a sudden craving for Sicilian-style pizza, which he'd glimpse nearby in an eatery open to the street and vanished to investigate. I was used to churches of considerable size – the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame, or the Jesuits' Gesu Church at Marquette University, but even after our experience of something as grand as the Church of San Marco in Venice the day before, I was somehow quite unprepared for something that could swallow all of those other churches without effort. Even seeing the Duomo the night before from the top of the tower had not given me a sense of scale to prepare me for what I was feeling then.


As I was ruminating on this, and studying the façade of the Cathedral, with occasional turns toward the Baptistery, Erik came back and sat next to me munching on his pizza, which he confessed didn't quite measure up to his hopes or memories. While we were sitting there, a beggar-woman moved toward us and began appealing to us, apparently in Italian. I deal with panhandlers quite a bit around Marquette, and have had to learn to harden myself against all my instincts or even what, on the surface of the situation, my faith would have me do. My uncle has given his life to working with many of the poor in this neighbourhood and it was eye-opening to have him instruct me under no circumstances to give money to my locals, all of whom he assured me knew what social services were available and did not need to be begging. Many of these people are clients of his and suddenly have professed no need whatsoever for anything, once they saw him present. Erik muttered something similar about professional beggars working the square, as the woman continued to implore us, gesturing with her plastic cup in hand to her faded gypsy-like clothing and to her pregnant belly. Erik and I both told her "no" for a few minutes as she continued to almost chant her words. Erik gave her the remainder of his meal eventually, which we did see her move off and consume so perhaps there was a genuine need there. It is the fact that there are so many without such genuine need that make begging such a murky situation.


We moved over to the Baptistery's South Doors, and I began to tell Erik the story that some people use as the marker for the beginning of the Renaissance. That is, the story of the contest of 1401, when a call went out to artists to submit samples for the making of a matched set of North Doors for the building. In short, each artist was to make one sample panel on the theme of the Sacrifice of Isaac. There were two standouts: Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's panels. Ghiberti's won the contest, and it is his work which makes up the north doors, with the theme of the Life of Christ. But it was Brunelleschi's panel that won the future. While Ghiberti's work showed a kind of state-of-the-art mastery of relief, Brunelleschi's panel made a quantum leap forward in its use of the rules of perspective that Brunelleschi had been working out. His figures leaped out of the bronze with a kind of life unseen in any work of his contemporaries. And for some tellings, that is the beginning of the Renaissance.


Others speak of other starting points. Giotto's work is one. Even if he never mastered the rules of mathematics that Brunelleschi did, it is in that early Master that we see the stirrings of what would become the art of the Italian Renaissance. Others write of the poet Petrarch, and the symbolism of his ascent of Mount Ventoux, and the emergence of a new world-transcending spirit evidenced there. Perhaps at the root of all of these are those who mark the start of this cultural shift as beginning with the figure of Francis of Assisi. Poor, powerless, and broken, there was no force greater for the Italian imagination than this figure who opened up all of nature and nature's world to the future. The heritage of not-quite vanished Rome and the impoverished broken body of the Christian saint of Assisi are the two ingredients most needed to understand the particular flavour of the Italian Renaissance.


After working our way the long way around to the North Doors, having to cross the street to round some construction, we studied Ghiberti's Life of Christ, picking out the stories he had chosen to illustrate, and murmuring about them to one another as we figured out various details. But it was as we came around to the East Doors, facing the Cathedral, that we saw that Ghiberti's art had not stopped growing with winning the contest, nor had Brunelleschi's breakthroughs gone without notice by him. Michelangelo himself called Ghiberti's East Doors of the Baptistery the "Gates of Paradise," and their telling of key stories of the Old Testament had profited from everything that the new rules of perspective had allowed artists to achieve. These panels had a different kind of life than the earlier ones, and it doesn't surprise me to read that Ghiberti considered them the principle work of his life. We were in fact looking at replicas, I knew, as the originals had been damaged in the huge flood of 1966, where the Arno River had risen not 19 feet above flood level, but 19 feet above street level. It was interesting reading to discover that the restoration of innumerable pieces of art still goes on 40 years later, but that the modern sciences of art restoration actually owe their existence to this huge disaster at one of our great centers of our heritage. Old piecemeal restoration in the past had long done more damage than good, but the careful systematic study of how to restore the damage of 1966 has now benefited art treasures the world wide. We studied these replicas now, in order to see the art as it was meant to be displayed, but we knew we would shortly be seeing the originals in the Museum of the Cathedral.


Here we were accosted by more beggars, including the woman we had run into before. We declined each of them in turn as we made our way toward the steps of the Cathedral, but I was beyond shocked when the original woman answered my "no" by taking her cup and hitting me in the face with it! I was more stunned than hurt, although my lip and nose smarted for some minutes. I kept repeating to Erik, "I can't believe she hit me!" And it was here that Erik and I both noticed two things. First, it seemed that every one of the beggar-women begging among the tourists around the Cathedral was pregnant. Odd, that. Right? Then, just as I was beginning to get suspicious, Erik pointed to one on the steps for whom the seam running around the edge of her "pregnant" belly was visible through her clothes as she paused in her work. Unbelievable. Here I was stuck in between my admiration of a celebration of human achievement, but also having been worried and ashamed of my unwillingness to trust that those begging of me had a real need that I was neglecting or rejecting. And the truth here was something else.


Go to: Florence: Day One, Part Two

Sunday, 23 July 2006, 1:07am

Well, even though I just signed off in Florence just now [coming soon to a journal near you], up on top of the tower, I think I'll make a couple of quick notes about Venice and how that ended, because I certainly didn't have time, or was cut off yesterday as I was trying to record it.

So we had come down to the San Marco area, as I said before, walking around the sea side of the Doge's Palace and then into the Piazza for a while, taking shots of the façade of San Marco. We were trying to soak that in since we missed going to Mass there, and had skipped the tour because of the great line and because everything I'd read indicated that you would not really be able to see the inside in any great detail because the tours only show you a corner of it, for ten minutes or something like that. I supposed that we could look at the complete tour online, although if anything, this trip has shown me that "online" is not the same, or books are not quite the same. I have to think of seeing the Michelangelo today in the Uffizi, the Holy Family painting of his, probably his only other painting than the Sistine Chapel ceiling: somehow I had it in my head that that work was in the inside of a dish or a bowl, and it was colossal, so certainly details can get confused over the years from reading that would not be mistakes you would make having actually seen the thing itself.

But back in Venice we tried to do an early lunch so that things would thin out around San Marco. We came back down to the Piazza, which didn't really show much signs of having thinned out – I'm told the evening time is the time to enjoy that – and we walked around the entire length of the porticoed buildings surrounding the square called the Procuratie.
We were still rather taken with the sight of the Basilica and continued to study and shoot it from different angles, talking about details we noted and what we knew of its history. We had decided over lunch to go into Museo Correr, which appealed in its descriptions as a place where we could take a walk through Venetian history. In fact, we walked around the square because we simply missed the entrance to the museum the first time. That was an interesting mistake, nevertheless, simply because it was impressive to look at the high-end shops surrounding the piazza. Myself, I was rather taken aback to see small works by Dali for sale for several thousands of Euro, just inside the window of one art dealer. I was suspicious, too, that these limited-number runs of small sculptures of his, and the like, were some of the things I had read about, to which his name and assent had been loosely slapped in his failing years, as art dealers had him signing his name to blank pieces of paper to which prints would be later added, if I remember correctly. While I was ruminating on this, I'd lost Erik, of course, so I had to hurry past the gold dealers to catch up with him. We finally found the doors of the museum and ascended though a glorious white neoclassical entry. It was an odd layout, because you actually have to work your way back through a vast amount of the museum to come to the earlier material, so we found ourselves largely drifting backward through the chronology of the Republic of Venice. Still, its mercantile and military days of glory were made vivid and obvious. Portraits of Doges and notable figures past, Lion-decked banners, a vast and nearly-complete coin display of the entire length of the Republic's days, weapons, and even large woodworked sections of old ships – with models present to give you a sense of the full scale – all drew our attention.

So it gave us a kind of an overview of the city, one I thought made the most of a variety of artifacts that added up to an interesting view of the city, although nothing that stood out as a great work of art. Erik wasn't sure whether it was worth the time or the money we put into it, given the selectivity of what we could 'sample' in our day in Venice. We then headed back out into the Procuratie, and walked along it toward the entrance to the Piazza. We stopped for some minutes of live music, a five- or six-piece group of violins, upright bass, piano and the like, that was being played for the people in one of the grand outdoor cafés, the Caffe Florian, as they were being waited up by uniformly handsome men in white formal jackets. The fellow playing the bass eyed Erik and I as we were listening and gave a particular nod to our applause at the end of a piece: I suspect he could tell the difference between those who simply heard the music and those who were really listening to it. We moved on, though, before we could be hassled for sitting where we weren't ordering and grabbed some gelatos for the first time. From my students who have studied in Italy, or from P.J. McCurry, I have heard many things about the famed, transcendent ice cream of Italy, so I had been looking forward to the experience. I got a mint chip out of a sense of obligation, almost, although I was very tempted by the lemon. I don't know what Erik got: chocolate or something, a double scoop. We walked around the corner and back out toward the sea from San Marco, stopping in the shade of the columns to enjoy our gelato. I took some pictures of a couple of girls from Miami on their camera – I should have taken one of them of my own because it was so funny chatting with them – but they were asking me to take pictures of them, and I putzed it up the first time. After giving me more instructions we chatted a bit more. They were just a really funny pair – tall, black, elegant, in their early 20s, probably – and we compared travel notes with them for a few minutes.

Then Erik and I walked west down toward the opening of the Grand Canal for a while, looking at the street vendors and artists more than anything else, until we took a water taxi across to the area called Dorsoduro. According to the plan we had made for the rest of the day, this would be our last time on the water and Erik was adamant that we would not play tourist and hire a gondola for the trip. I suspected that that was something he didn't care to "sample" until he was visiting Venice with someone less masculine! As we waited for a water taxi – which might be more accurately called, by Americans, a water "bus" – he talked about how surprised he was at the rusty or work condition of a lot of the water transport of the city. He had mentioned this earlier in the day, too, and contrasted it to his experiences of New York, where he insisted that anything so visibly worn would have long since been retired. We debated whether this was a sign of the economic struggles of Venice and its domination by and dependence upon the tourist industry, or whether it was just a different economic/aesthetic from a continent that was used to much more visible evidence of sheer age than the United States was, where what is new is too often associated with what is good. This conversation carried us across the river and to the head of the Grand Canal, beautifully dominated by the church called La Salute, more properly called Santa Maria della Salute: Saint Mary's of/Our Lady of Good Health. It was so named because it was built as a thanksgiving for the end of the 1630 plague outbreak. We paused outside, studying both our destination and now looking back at the San Marco region we had just left and taking note of the view from across the water. I was struck by the shades of colour giving way from the white to the lighter terracotta in the picture I took of these buildings across the water. Erik took a portrait shot of me with the Campanile, the Belltower of the Piazza San Marco, in the background. [After I returned to Milwaukee, I saw that this was part of a series of pictures Erik took of me with my eyes closed, Erik apparently not having embraced the finer benefits of digital photography. This is my favourite of the lot.] After enjoying the tall, Baroque splendor of its exterior for a little while, we went into La Salute, trying now to soak in the architecture from within. We missed the Tintoretto Marriage at Canathat I guess was back there in the sacristy, but there was a Titian Baptism of Christ, I think, that caught my eye. But it was an interesting space, a largely round church, where we were both struck by the incredibly long chandelier that came down on this strong chain all the way down through this immensely high central domed space. The side chapel was filled up for current Masses and it did not seem that there were using this central space anymore, and it was roped off, thus herding the tourists around the edges of the main circle of the church.


Then we walked back on the south side of that island, toward the ocean. Passing through a brief neighbourhood, as the island was not very wide at this point, we saw this set of flags hanging from a house on the canal by La Salute. We were struck by the series – the new European Union, Italy, and the old flag of the Republic of Venice – and the unity they conveyed of both a contemporary and active political awareness with a deep respect for the distinct heritage of the islands. We began walking along the promenade along the south end of the island, the Zattere, that ran right along the water's edge there. The quayside was quite, flanked with old warehouses, cafés and churches. It wasn't open to the sea, though, because of the long barrier island further out, La Guidecca across the Guidecca canal. There we were faced with the stark front of the church Il Redentore, and further out to the east, the slightly separated island San Giorgio Maggiore, dominated by its active Benedictine monastery of the same name. Erik and I had debated heading out to that community, and studied the church from across the water, but that, too, was a sacrifice to time. The longer, outer island of Guidecca is the home of the Venice Film Festival, and we had read that expatriate nobility like Elton John having bought a small palazzo there were making it an increasingly hip place to live year-round, and not just when the stars cavorted there for the Festival. It was suddenly and stunningly quiet back there, with virtually no one else in sight. We finally worked our way, roughly north-by-northwest, to head back toward the train station with the intention of looking at the life of the city itself rather than the tourist life. We were finally getting a taste of residential Venice and I think we both really liked it. These streets and canals were quiet, and here and there you would run into a tiny splash of garden outside a home, perhaps behind a wall. I found myself stunned to see a tree for the first time on the streets of the city, other than perhaps back along the large walkways where the street vendors had been collected. You suddenly realized that you hadn't seen a tree in any domestic situation, and were reminded of the need to use every foot of the limited land of the islands: a garden, however small, was a luxury. We ended up back on the Grand Canal at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, which was our intention. When we came out of the warren of little streets, it was behind us as I was sitting there with my map on the steps of a bridge, looking in front of me and to both sides for landmarks on the Grand Canal, trying to figure out exactly where we were. There was the Accademia with the bold name of the place bannered hugely over its entire face, but invisible to me, because it hadn't dawned on me to look at the building I was standing in front of. So Erik had a good laugh at me as I was trying to figure out our location after he noticed that.

The Accademia explained why our other stops had had only a smattering of strong art: it seemed that every great piece of art in Venice had been enclosed within this one set of walls. We went in there and that was a really good, quick loop through Venice's chief art treasures. Whereas Erik had pronounced the first museum not worth our money, this second one was very much so, like the Uffizi here today in Florence. While nothing captured me there like the huge grins breaking over my face that I experienced today, I have to say that I was deeply impressed. We were moving fast, and this was art that I largely hadn't seen or studied before, and so impressions are already faded, but I can remember being struck by some of the medieval pieces. Yet it was my first serious encounter with Tintoretto that really was the gem of the visit. I had really only encountered him indirectly, either by references that one must see the Tintorettos in Venice – I think that was of some significance in the plot of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, if I recall correctly – or by the fact that his Crucifixion, which I now felt the full power of, was used as the cover art for Raymond Brown's volume The Death of the Messiah. The wild stampede of his Creation of the Animals, the Saint Mark cycle, like the Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave, or the wild and overwhelming The Stealing of the Dead Body of St. Mark (again a popular theme for Venice, and its civic pride in holding Mark's relics), all grabbed me. Likewise, it made me blink to suddenly be in the presence of what has to be the most reproduced scene of Venice, Bellini's Procession in Piazza San Marco while having that same view fresh in my eye's memory. We both laughed at some point to see Canaletto's The Bucintoro Returning to the Molo on Ascension Day – I can't remember whether that was at the Accademia or not, and if so, how, since I don't think it's part of their collection – for the same reason. In fact, I'm struck by the accidental similarity to my shot from the prior entry.

The rest of our time went fairly quickly. After leaving the Accademia, we continued to move west and north, just taking in the neighbourhoods as we went. After crossing the student/university area, which didn't stand out as such terribly strongly, we crossed the long Campo di Santa Margherita, which my guidebook recommended as the liveliest square for local nightlife and bars, although I also remember blinking at reading the line, "Given the contagiously upbeat mood, blue-rinse matrons from Milwaukee often join peace-protesting students in sipping a lurid orange spritz in one of the arty cafés." I confess that I didn't recognize anyone. Here in the late afternoon, it was a more quiet and relaxed liveliness we noted, as folks stretched out in the chairs in small outdoor cafés, or bought fruit from local market stands. It wasn't so driven by a youth bar crowd as perhaps it might be later at night. Erik and I paused so that he could grab some slices of pizza in a hot, tiny delivery place we noticed, and we sat there drinking while he ate and enjoyed the view of the industrious and beautiful young blonde who had served him. Our time was ticking away, as as we wandered north out of the Campo, Erik paused for another gelato. I walked ahead a little ways, waiting for him at the base of the next bridge. There, as I looked around, I found myself rather taken by the detail work on one of the worn buildings nearby, and grabbed this shot of all the distinctive little faces decorating it. I've come to be pretty fond of detailwork in recent years, and the character that it lends a building, and which we find so utterly lacking in construction today. We went on, veering west and noticing the increasing displays of wealth as we seemed to work our way into an upscale hotel area, if I remember correctly. Surprising ourselves by stumbling into the largest park area we had seen, the Giardino Papadopoli, which turned out to be standing more-or-less across from the train station, we made our way out of that and found ourselves nearing the end of our journey. While Erik – with increasing signs of impatience – waited for me as paused repeatedly at sidewalk vendors, we decided to take the slightly longer way around by walking down the Grand Canal, past the San Simeone Piccolo church that stands directly across from the station (in the background of the picture of Erik as we arrived in Venice) and across the bridge just off to the side of station, the Ponte degli Scalzi. We were a bit surprised to find a troop of Native Americans singing and dancing tribal songs just outside the station, and paused momentarily to listen to them, before we went inside and painlessly retrieved our luggage just as our train was ready to board.

And then we were off to Florence.


Go to: Florence: Day One, Part One

Friday 21 July 2006, 8:40pm

Well, I'm on the train now, heading to Florence, just having pulled out of Bologna, and the hills are just starting to hide the sunset. It's getting really quiet and pretty outside. Not too bright. It was almost ferocious today: I'm pretty burned across the face.

Our first evening in Geneva was spent down by the shore of Lake Geneva, where much of the city comes out to socialize and enjoy the air and light. Erik and I had left the World Health Organization by around 6pm and took the bus into the city. Obviously, everything looked different than the mere shapes of the streets I'd become accustomed to on my guidebook map of the city, and so I was pretty thoroughly lost. We got off at the main train station and walked some five or six blocks to Erik's place. As it turned out, Erik had taken a room in the middle of Geneva's red light district, in the neighbourhood called Les Pâquis. It wasn't particularly poor or seedy-looking, but Erik indicated sadly where the prostitutes were already staking out street corners. For a few blocks around the place he lived, it seemed that everything was either a falafel/kebob place or a strip club. I was very grateful to be able to shower after now nearly two days, and we set out to initiate Mike into the local business life. Of the falafel, that is. It was somehow something that I'd never gotten around to trying, and I was a bit nervous as to how my digestive system would react to it, given its moodiness. We headed down to the lakeshore to eat and to look at the city.
It was low-key, but bright out and perfect for continuing to catch up. The rocky finger that passed for a beach was filled with sunbathers and some people were taking to the water. The Lake was generously sprinkled with sails. As the sun went down, we returned to his place, got ready and headed to the train stations with our bags to catch our 10:30 night train to Venice. We were the first in our compartment, although we were told by the conductor that we would be filling the place as we went along, and so we just quickly let down our bunks from the wall and went to sleep.


I woke up to the train this morning in the middle of the Po valley, running down it toward Venice, with the Italian hills beginning to glow off to the north. I cannot express the private joy I felt in the sight: this was a land I had crossed and re-crossed in thought through the years, with so much history I've studied that has passed this way. To see it with my own eyes – to just quietly take it in while Erik and the others still slept – was a simple kind of bliss. There was a young Indian couple sleeping in our carriage, and two hip girls from Korea, decked out in clothes proclaiming "Florida." It was kind of a strange approach: there was all this industry and you were never quite certain when you were going to see Venice or the water. I wasn't quite sure how thick all that industry was, although I expected it from the descriptions of the city in the guidebook I'd been studying. We were going past docked ships: freighters, ocean liners; industrial manufacturing places, chemical plants. We finally broke out over the causeway out to Venice with the Adriatic flat out to the horizon. We were able to dump our baggage in a room at the train station, and pay for that for the day. We also purchased our tickets for Florence that evening, after discovering that the last train that would work for us would leave Venice at 6:30pm rather than 9:30pm as we had expected. Obviously that meant less time in Venice, but we had decided to prioritize Florence by giving it two full days, and there was nothing to do about it. Everything we needed to do was settled pretty quickly and we got out on the streets.


Standing out in the piazza behind the train station, we took in our first view of the city. We've all seen it on film if never in real life: there's nothing like Venice. Even if this wasn't a particularly famed or memorable spot, it was already distinct in an unmistakable way. Unfortunately, I had not retained a great deal of my earlier study on the city. Florence was a place I'd studied since my undergraduate. Venice had seemed overwhelming just in the pages of my guidebook. I'd studied it first, in preparing for the trip, but right at that moment it seemed as though a lot of my reading on Venice had been washed away by my later weeks' study of Florence. So now Erik and I pulled out my guidebook and tried to work out a basic plan of attack for the city.


We grabbed a water taxi first thing, laughing at the competent irritation of a young blonde woman working there who seemed pretty fed up with the idiot questions of Americans, and we went the length of the Grand Canal, past San Marco to the next landing at San Zaccaria. We were taking photographs the whole way and just soaking in the sheer presence of the place. Everywhere we were under the eye of some version of the winged Gospel Lion of San Marco: reliefs, statues, paintings and the still-present flag of the Republic of Venice, a country now two centuries vanished. I was marking places in my head to come back to see, virtually all of which we failed to do, not coming anywhere near the places as we were wandering. Just entirely too much to see, too much to do. It ended up being somewhere where we were content to not do a whole lot. Erik called it "sampling," just scouting the place out for when we could really come and visit. "Sampling" was a good term.






We walked a ways further east along the canal from San Zaccaria on the Riva degli Schiavoni before turning north, up del Forno, I think, so that I could see the Carpaccios that I wanted to, especially the Augustine that I love, at the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. That was our only real flat-out disaster of the day. The church had shut its hours down from 3:30 to 5:30 and we were there at probably around 9am. Now, on our way to San Giorgio's, we had already happened by San Giovanni in Bragora, which was an accident, but we had ducked into this church to take in the Alvise Vivarini Resurrection, Cima da Conegliano's Baptism of Christ, the proudly-displayed body of one St. John the Almsgiver, of whom neither of us had heard (although that will likely be said of us, too, in time), and the interesting ships-keel ceiling and architecture of the church as a whole. After our dash through the tourist-strewn Grand Canal, it was refreshing to pause in this church where we were the only two visitors, with no feeling that that was going to change. Now, having been defeated by the closed Scuola di San Giorgio, we paused, and Erik shot back down the direction we had come, while I noted the old woman watching Erik setting up his shot. I then set up pretty much the same shot myself. The tower belongs, I believe to the church of San Antonio, and the canal before me is the Rio della Pieta, although behind me from that bridge it was called the Rio della Agostin. I'm not sure why. I would be surprised if it had anything to do with such a universally high regard for the Carpaccio portrayal of Augustine that I missed seeing just off that bridge. From that point, we started working our way over toward San Marco. I had already been looking in the mask shops. We found a very nice one, right as we had started up del Forno, and Erik had already started practicing patience with my time taking time to look at this particular Venetian art. The elaborate masked and costumed celebration of Carnival revived in Venice some decades ago, and the making of these masks has turned into a distinctive tourist craft. We ultimately ended up, without any intention, tripping our way right in front of one the most-recommended mask shops, Ca' del Sol, and so I had to stop in there to examine the wares and talk with the proprietors as best as I was able.


We worked our way around the front entrance to San Marco, walking around the Doge's Palace, past the Bridge of Sighs, and photographing parts of the façade and looking at large, posted diagrams about the construction going on outside of that area, which was devoted to reinforcing the seawall or improving drainage or somesuch. My eye was taken with the carvings on the row of pillars at the base of the façade, which is the beige building you see on the right of the photos taken from the canal, above, and which is set in front of the Basilica of San Marco. Each pillar featured a unique set of carvings, worth a study in themselves, but I was particularly taken with the medieval woman I captured in this shot, while Erik read the engineering displays behind me. We debated whether or not to head into the Doge's Palace for the tour, but decided to sacrifice this to the "sampling" of the city. We started making our way through the crowds of people (and the famed flocks of tourist-devouring pigeons) and into the Piazza San Marco. We had arrived too late to try to take in a morning Mass at the Basilica, which while originally the chapel of the Doge ("the largest private chapel in the world," one kept hearing, wondering why the Duke needed something that big if it was really to be thought of as "private") has now also been the Cathedral of the city for the last two centuries. Given the huge lines waiting to get in, and the very restricted tourist access to the Basilica (much more of it being able to be seen on its website, above), we decided that visiting the Basilica, too, would be sacrificed. I was disappointed, of course, as I'm somewhat fond of San Marco both because it was the seat of Angelo Roncalli as Patriarch of Venice before he was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, and because I was born on the feast of Saint Mark: April 25th. But we took our time making a leisurely study of the façade of the church, which is composed of the most exquisite, delicately-shaded variety of colourful marbles I've ever seen, and which bears illustrations for stories such as the city's beloved theme of making off with the body of their patron, Saint Mark, from his original tomb in the Muslim-conquered city of Alexandria in Egypt, and burying it here at the Basilica for the protection and honour of the city. Although, as I said, we took our time with this, this was yet another thing that would reward hours of study while we were only able to give it perhaps a half-hour at most, as we worked our way around the building.



Erik suggested that we try to work our way back further into the city in order to try to find a place to order lunch, so as to try to work our way out of the crowds, and to do this a bit on the early side, so that we could eat and then come back to the Piazza in the heat of the lunch hour in hopes that we might find it thinned out as the bulk of the tourists went off in search of their own meals. So we worked our way vaguely northeast of San Marco's, pausing now and again to scan the prices listed on the menus outside various restaurants. In fact, it took us a while just to find one that would seat us as such an early hour. We finally did end up in a strange little place that said they'd start serving in ten minutes, and so we settled in. I call it strange because the help kept fluctuating between hospitable smiles and snarling at us like we were depraved killers out to give their establishment a bad name. I could also call the place a bit odd as I noticed that Erik was sitting under a wall devoted entirely to pictures of famed Disney dog Benji, while the wall behind me turned out (I noticed later) to be devoted to some equally-repulsive or ludicrous theme, but which I have blocked out of memory, unfortunately. It was just good, though, to get into a place with some air conditioning and to get out of the sun. I had already begun to turn lobster-red, and was more-or-less resigned to moving on to the next stage of peeling back to my Irish pale white, having not had the foresight to pack or buy any sunscreen. It was around 95ºF at its peak that day, in contrast to the relatively-cool high of 92º we had left behind in Geneva. (I had had the ill fortune to travel around the world in time with the heat wave that had been wracking the United States for the previous week.) So we had our tortellini bolognese and chattered away about what we had been seeing and what we ought to do next. I irritated Erik by taking bad pictures of him at the table, and we consumed vast amounts of bottled water for which we paid ridiculous prices, particularly so after Erik had noted the wait staff filling those bottles back up with tap water, apparently for subsequent customers.

Then it was afternoon and time for more adventures!


Go to: Venice: Part Two

Wednesday 19 July 2006, 5:36pm (local)

So much craziness already. I'm at the airport in Newark, and today has not been my day. The first thing was, I had to wait half an hour for a bus to show up: any bus. So my plan to get to the airport on time already seemed to be off to a bad start. This got worse when it turned out that after transferring to the 80 on 6th street, I was on the wrong bus. I was on the right line, just the wrong bus. This was the airport-line bus that didn't go to the airport. Convenient, that. So, I freaked out when the bus came to a stop and rushed over across the street to another stop, hoping against hope that a bus would come along. Which one did. So now it was noon, right on the dot, with my flight leaving at 12:35. Unfortunately, my flight was right on time, unlike my last one, on my Boston trip. So I checked in, and it was too late for me to check my bag, which is colossal, designed to be able to peal away some of its contents as I go along. So I had to haul that with me, and the guy said I'd just be able to take it on board and that I should be alright.

In Security I got hung up because I thought I'd be able to check this bag and it had my Swiss Army Knife in it. So I was now being faced with the choice of having to get rid of this. The guy suggested that I could go out into the lobby and mail it back to myself, but I didn't have the time because we were already boarding. Now this Swiss Army knife is something that my Mom gave me for my 10th or 11th birthday: the best, most useful present I ever got, (especially having a pair of scissors in your pocket is especially handy) and something that means a great deal to me, having come from her. When faced with that anecdote, the guy volunteered to take it and mail it back to my apartment. So that will be above and beyond the call of duty, if that in fact happens. And boy, am I hoping it happens, 'cause that thing means a lot to me. [Edit: the knife was not here when I returned from Europe, July 26th, but to my delight was in my mailbox when I returned from babysitting the nieces on August 7th, but without any name or return address, so I can't reward the Security worker as I wished.]

So I hobbled on board with my giant bag, just as the last seats were filling in, which is where I was, up in front. The flight was very quick and uneventful out to Newark. I had to check in again, and so, fortunately, I was able to check my bag for this international flight. I'm flying Continental out to Geneva. I thought I was on Lufthansa, so I didn't remember that one very well. So I checked the bag, went through Security, and finally get down to my gate, only to realize that I forgot to get my keys, and watch, and pill box from the Security station. So I zoomed back down through the building after realizing this while buying my currency (Euros and Swiss Francs), to ask and see if I could find my keys, which, mercifully, were right there in the Lost and Found. That pretty much brings us up to date here: late bus, wrong bus, not able to check my luggage, losing my Swiss Army knife that my Mom gave me, losing my keys etc., gaining my keys back. It's been a rough day, but minor-league roughness compared to what some people have to endure. So lots of franticness and lots of last-minute saves. So: Newark.


Thursday 20 July 2006, 9:43am

I am in the airport lounge, sipping a Fanta, in Geneva. Kind of surprised by the airport: more of a mid-sized airport for the United States, something more like I'd expect from Rockford or Kalamazoo or South Bend. Just a very important location. I'm sipping a Fanta because these were my instructions from Erik: to break up my bills so that I could get exact change as needed to buy a bus ticket. The bus ticket will happen shortly when I get up the gumption to walk outside after I finish my Fanta. Nice flight over. Didn't get a lick of sleep: you know, landing here at 8:30 means it's only 1:30am back home, and of course I wouldn't be anywhere sleep yet. Noon here or one o'clock will be closer to when I'd be falling asleep, so that's when things will get difficult if I try to stretch the day through til Erik and I get on the train for Venice tonight at 10:30. My instructions are now to take the city bus to the World Health Organization Headquarters and to meet Erik there.

I had a great flight, though: I ended up seated next to a great girl named Kaley, who was part of a high school leadership group – 42 students from all over, here for mock-UN-type stuff, observing and learning and that sort of thing, with all that sort of camp arrangement. You have a very bright kid here: it was just fun talking with a high school student again at length, and to hear abbreviations like "AP" (Advanced Placement exams high school students take) instead of "DQE" (Doctoral Qualifying Exams). So just had a great time chatting with her through the night, both of us not managing to sleep a lick. Not a whole lot else going on. It's a shame to try to sum up the conversation with this kid so quickly because it was just absolutely charming. She was very mathematics-oriented; we talked very straightforwardly about manipulating statistics and so forth. She's interested in Law. She was looking at BC and Georgetown; she'd visited those schools already. I tried to chat up the Catholic schools, of course, and we talked about law and ethics, and international business, which she was also thinking about. Just fun. Definitely more of that business/legal/go-getter, not the liberal arts types that I'm usually surrounded by. Put ten years on her and she would have been just the "nothing in common"-type person I could imagine clicking with: she was very genial, curious, and a great conversationalist already for her age.

So now I'm hoping that I can figure out the signs to the bus correctly. I had a little bit of a hard time making chaahhnge with the bartender here. I was being too complicated. So. Off to see the wizard.


Thursday 20 July 2006, 2:36pm
Some thoughts I recorded later, but which might fit better here: Erik's directions were perfect, and I soon found myself getting off at the stop he described and walking over to the headquarters in Geneva of the World Health Organization, where he is interning for the summer in their Mental Health division. I was a bit disappointed by the architecture of the place. Indeed, all the architecture of the UN buildings in this international sector of Geneva were of that modern, 1950s/1960s, metal and concrete, "ultra modern" look, which no doubt seemed exciting and progressive at the time, but now seems rather ugly or dated. You can imagine it being sleek and impressive looking in the background of an early Sean Connery James Bond movie like Dr. No. I wondered what people 1000 years from now would think of us if some remnant of the thing would still be around for them to observe.

Inside, it was somewhat more attractive. I mean, it still suffered from the tired functionality of buildings of this era, but I will say that the UN people at least have a proper and healthy regard for the importance of art in human space, even if the buildings themselves seemed rather artless. The lobby was a fairly impressive and pleasant place, with tables where people chatted or brainstormed, with small shops – like a bakery, an internet coffeeshop, and a post office – opening off the space. Portraits of former heads of the WHO, a giant painting in the Pollock mode, and more representational works of art graced the space, which made it much more human. Erik drew my attention to the scores of old posters that lined the walls, all sorts of different public health posters of various sorts, representing years of WHO work around the world, summing up different sorts of health information and trying to put that wisdom into the hands and live of people everywhere. The design work in these posters, too, turned into a significant and impressive art of its own, and the cumulative effect of the efforts to aid and educate in them gave a great kind of history lesson about the work of the WHO. Work has become art. Then, the significant space given over to intentional works of art becomes significant on top of that. There is an openness to art in these buildings that is very attractive, regardless of the quality of the individual piece of art: the sheer fact that you had that kind of High Renaissance recognition of the role of art in a public space or public building, especially in a building like this which is dedicated to the betterment of the entire global civilization. It all became impressive, informative, moving, and very pleasing.

Back to my journal, more as it was recorded: So I split off the street to this sort of side cut that Erik, on the map, said he'd never seen or gone on. It's marked at the bus stop as the Vie du Champes. It's a beautiful cut through this small patch of woods, these huge incredible trees, massive white oaks leaning away from the path. I took a few pictures of this statue off the side which turned out to be the 1810 liberator of Mexico. Why that's here, I don't know, but everyone of that sort seems to be here. And this lovely path – I found myself just singing Randall Thompson's version of Frost's "The Road Not Taken," and that goes all the way back to high school, but I still remember it, Randall Thompson's melodies being so simple and brilliant and clean and beautiful.

I had a great lunch down in the cafeteria or restaurant of the World Health Organization, sitting out in the hot sun on a patio off the dining room. I just kind of loitered this morning with Erik, mostly in his office, although he took me on a walk around the building, particularly up to the deck on the roof from where he could show me all of Geneva below us on the lake, and France all around us. I was a little bit too weathered for a while to go right away to the Red Cross Museum, unfortunately, so we didn't do the jazz concert over lunch that would have been outside the museum. But we had a good talk, and catching up on the personal-type stuff, particularly a couple of episodes or turns of Erik's life that I hadn't been up to date on, so kind of getting the narrative straight.

I'm heading over to the Museum of the Swiss Abroad, to see an exhibition on the Pope's Swiss Guard, who are celebrating their 500th anniversary this year. I'll save the Red Cross Museum for Monday: Monday or Tuesday will give me a little more leisure. I met some of the people Erik's working with, including Claire, a charming English med student who was part of the group he went with to see the Matterhorn last weekend, and Tomas, a French medical student working here for just a month that he's hung out with, and who invited to go see – aptly enough – the Who play a concert tomorrow, which Erik had to decline on the grounds of us being off to Venice. Tomas immediately assumed we would be going there with some women, and immediately wanted to know who we were going to Venice with, and so we had to reveal just how messed up and sorry we were and that that was not the case. Tons of young people interning here. Lots of women between 20 and 25 from all over the world; a lot of Americans; some people Erik's been able to hang out with, although he feels that there's a little bit of an age gap with the undergraduates and those just out of their undergraduates, which is understandable.


4:22pm

I'm walking out the gate of Le Musée des Suisses dans le Monde, by the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations. This is a great place for gates, this walk from the WHO to the Museum. I finally did walk by the American Mission, with Swiss Soldiers on the outside and lots of American guards just inside the gate, with a new gate or entryway being worked on. The exhibit on the Swiss Guard was interesting. It was not the strongest presentation I've ever seen for a museum. There was a video offered as an introduction which turned out to be a full-length documentary. So after I'd been sitting there for 40 minutes I had a lot of information I still hadn't seen any of the exhibit yet, so since I had to meet Erik at 5, I pressed Pause and got going. A number of different uniforms. I learned that the whole thing about Michelangelo designing those uniforms was a myth, so that's one concrete, useful bit of information. A lot of variety with these uniforms, the present version only dating back to 1915 if I remember correctly. So there was a lot of different peraphernalia: old regalia, medals, old uniforms, portraits of different Commandants of the Guard through the centuries, oil paintings apparently being a traditional accoutrement to the position. They had a lot of items for sale afterward, baseball caps with the 500th anniversary commemorative logo, polo shirts, but the only thing that really caught my eye was a scarf that had the 500th anniversary emblem and the bold striped colors of the Guards' jackets, which I've long found attractive. But that was sold out, so certainly other people recognized that that was rather tastefully done and attractive. So I might look for that on the internet if I can, but they didn't have any left here. [Edit: I looked all over the internet in English, French and German: no such luck. Anyone wanna knit me a Swiss Guard scarf in that rich gold, blue and red? But it was cooler with that emblem....] So it was okay as exhibits go.

I'm certainly not thinking much of the Swiss penchant for putting sidewalks right on the narrow street, right up on the curb [lots of traffic sounds helping to explain that]. Walked past some of those Swiss soldiers standing guard outside the American embassy just now. They looked at me like I was rather strange, talking into this thing. I should probably be glad that I didn't get questioned for taking notes outside, like when Jen got us stopped by the police back in Northern Ireland for wanting to photograph the prison/"torture center." That was not a good idea. So... on my way back.


Go to: Day Two: Geneva to Venice

A long night of communicating with hotel clerks later, (for once my internal clock works to my advantage) and Erik and I have our stay in Florence booked. Being on relatively short notice, I was a bit nervous about being able to get what I wanted, but I think we did quite well. The Hotel Torre Guelfo (Erik and I would definitely come down on the Guelf side of things) is right in the heart of the Florentine highlights, just yards from the Ponte Vecchio, the Uffizi, and the Piazza della Signoria. Perfect! And it has its own antique tower for rooftop relaxation amid one of the world's great views....

Maybe alarmist, maybe not? Still, as an historian, particularly an ancient historian, and as one for whom Rome is his favourite city on the planet, it's the kind of thing to keep me concerned....

A view of the frescos inside Roman Emperor Augustus' house, in Rome, Monday, June 19, 2006. Excavations atop the Palatine in recent last decades have turned up wonders like Augustus' house, including two rooms with stunning frescoes of masked figures and pine branches, which archaeologists hope tourists will be able to see once the Palatine is safer. (AP Photo/Plinio Lepri) Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All right reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Rome's Ancient Sites Are at Eternal Peril

Jul 2, 5:20 PM (ET)

By FRANCES D'EMILIO

ROME (AP) - Weeds with stone-splitting roots. Relentless traffic belching pollution. Tourists trampling across the once palatial residences of emperors. Earthquakes and terrorism waiting to happen.

From the imposing stone bulk of the Colosseum to the romantic ruins of imperial luxury atop the Palatine Hill, the Eternal City's monuments, once pillaged by foreign conquerors, today face an array of perils old and new.

Rome's fragile ruins have the urgent attention of teams of monument "doctors," armed with such high-tech instruments as micro-cameras probing for weak spots.

So far, the Colosseum has made it through two millennia, its imposing stone bulk still standing after quakes, lightning strikes, pillaging, traffic tearing round it and subway cars vibrating below. And now, following the terrorist bombings in London and Madrid, the great stadium where gladiators once thrilled the masses is equipped with metal detectors.

( Read more... )

For years, I've had Masaccio on the brain. It sounds painful, or itchy, perhaps, but at least this piece of drama in my life is not medical. Masaccio's Holy Trinity is what we're talking about, here. Samuel Kinser introduced me to this masterpiece of the young 15th century painter my senior year, in my Honours Renaissance course, which – despite the fact that I did most of my coursework with my great mentor Marvin A. Powell, Jr. – was the singlemost excellent course of my undergraduate. Professor Kinser is, among other things, particularly known as a specialist in Carnival in Europe and America, a scholar of the blow-out party, and while focused and rigorous, his seminars were nevertheless festivals of learning. He came close to stealing my historical focus from antiquity and centering it on the Italian Renaissance. While that didn't quite happen, the Renaissance has remained prominent among my historical interests and is absolutely dominant for my visual arts sensibilities. On another personal note, anyone starting to make connections to my casting of my band as "the Renaissance Men" would be right on target: that particular ideal – so lauded by our vision of that age – was an obvious one for describing the stunning and diverse talents of my friends from Notre Dame.

Masaccio's Trinity is my number-one priority for my upcoming day – only a day! – in Florence with Erik. In fact, when Erik proposed this Venice-Florence weekend road rail trip as part of my visiting him in Geneva, it was the image of this painting (well, along with the image of the Duomo, of course – I mean, hey, it's in everyone's picture of Florence) that immediately popped into my head. In fact, it didn't just pop, it exploded into my head, and beat pots together to create an overwhelming mental clanging. Erik proceded to natter on about getting to Michelangelo's David early, ahead of the crowds, and I nodded vaguely, all the while pushing the David way down on my list so that this fresco could take all the top ten positions on my priority list. And that despite the fact that Michelangelo has grown in my affections over the last decade, having replaced Botticelli in recent years as my favourite artist. (My love for Botticelli, and initially especially for his Mystical Nativity, also being due to Professor Kinser.)



I dread the fact that I might not get to sit at length and engage myself with the Trinity in the way that I'd like to. When we lost Hugh Carter in the Vatican Museums in April 1998, Erik did me the great favour of letting me sit in the Sistine Chapel for an hour while he backtracked our entire course. The crowd flowing through the space – punctuated by criminal morons taking flash photographs of the ceiling – made really interacting with the art extremely difficult. Following the artists into theology and prayer, which is what the art aspires to, was even more difficult. This will be a different sort of chance to interact theologically with Masaccio's Trinity than I've had just by studying prints of it. But since this is the singlemost prominent Trinity in the art contained in my memory – a piece that almost always comes to mind in the course of my own trinitarian work – I am really hoping to have a chance to be open to it. But this "one day only" adventure of ours inevitably will push me toward being something more along the lines of the "checklist" tourists I can't stand, who don't take the time to really encounter what they see, or don't discover enough of who they themselves are so that they can pursue what might be particularly significant for them and instead just work through the checklist of what they've been told is important. (I loved how the Vatican Museums were designed to conquer such people in spite of themselves, if possible, by having every room from the entry bear a sign reading "Sistine Chapel" with an arrow, as though it would be just through the door. These were then arranged in such a way as to take the tourist through everything before depositing them in the famed Chapel at the very end of their journey.) So am I sounding like an affected snob or like someone who takes art seriously?

Now on top of everything else on my plate, I've got to do a great deal of reading and research for the trip, and with so much that's of interest to me in Florence in particular, I want to have a pretty detailed plan of attack for our time in the city. The David is worth seeing, of course, but the Duomo and the Baptistery, Brunelleschi's work – in particular the dome of the Cathedral, of course, and his "Sacrifice of Isaac" bronze proposal for the Baptistery doors – and Michelangelo's Medici tombs, as well as the remains of the Pietà he was carving for his own tomb (I've always seen this one as influencing the majestic silence latent in Ivan Meštrović's Pietà at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame) all currently stand out in my head as higher priorities for me.

Any other recommendations by those of you who have been there?

Thanks to friede for pointing this one out to me. It's not like we didn't all know this, more-or-less. Some of the responses on the Slate website to the original article are actually rather interesting in why they argue that this is all positive, while the author here clearly dislikes the artificiality of what's happening. What am I talking about? Sorry about that. Read below.

Ireland's "Crack" Habit
Explaining the faux Irish pub revolution.
By Austin Kelley
Posted Thursday, March 16, 2006, at 5:44 AM ET

Ireland, as much of the world knows it, was invented in 1991. That year, the Irish Pub Company formed with a mission to populate the world with authentic Irish bars. Whether you are in Kazakhstan or the Canary Islands, you can now hear the lilt of an Irish brogue over the sound of the Pogues as you wait for your Guinness to settle. A Gaelic road sign may hang above the wooden bar and a fiddle may be lying in a corner. As you gaze around, you might think of the Irish—O, that friendly, hard-drinking, sweater-wearing people!—and smile. Your smile has been carefully calculated.

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries. Guinness threw its weight (and that of its global parent Diageo) behind the movement, and an industry was built around the reproduction of "Irishness" on every continent—and even in Ireland itself. IPCo has built 40 ersatz pubs on the Emerald Isle, opening them beside the long-standing establishments on which they were based.

( Read more... )

I've never been to Berlin, never heard of these particulars, but this was so well-written and interesting that I thought it deserved notice and preservation.

The New York Times
Editorial Observer

An Insecure City Demolishes Its Own Charm

By NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: February 26, 2006

When I first lived in Berlin more than a decade ago, my favorite moment each morning was when my streetcar rumbled past a giant black bust of a dead Communist hero, Ernst Thälmann. Dawn came stubbornly late in winter and the temperature was often well below freezing. Waiting for the streetcar to come, stamping my feet to keep the feeling in my toes, I would often question why I had chosen the frigid outer reaches of Germany over my second choice, Barcelona.

Passing ugly old Ernst's monumental bald head, I remembered why. Here was Adolf Hitler's opposite in the era of street fighting captured in Christopher Isherwood's "Berlin Stories." Thälmann was executed by the Nazis at Buchenwald in 1944. The cold war Communist government erected this ugly statue while the city was still the center of a standoff between superpowers. It had since been tagged around the base with extensive graffiti in the strange brew of post-wall Berlin.

I never much worried about Ernst's value as art. His clunky statue brought together the most interesting eras in the city's history, which were also reflections of larger forces in Europe and the world beyond. In many ways, Berlin was the defining city of the 20th century, and here was proof.

My thoughts drifted back to Ernst when I learned that workers there have begun tearing down another monument to that Communist era. The Palace of the Republic is a squat thing, a dumpy rectangle of concrete and steel. Its only real claim to beauty was bronze glass that could catch a sunset just so and emanate a warm glow. The first panels of the facade have come down and by next year there will be nothing left.

( Read more... )

One of those really fun emails with which to start your day, from Erik:

From: Erik
To: NovakFreek@aol.com
Subject: Viva la Freeks!
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2006 11:10:35 -0500

Hey Mike,

Spain was awesome. You would have loved the sites where we visited: Grandada,
Cordoba, Seville, Gibraltar, etc. The history was amazing, a mix of Moorish and
Spanish architecture. Think Michelangelo meeting the Muslims. Wonderful!!!
You'll have to come to Boston to see the pictures though. There's your carrot.
The stories about Gibraltar are amazing - I'm sure you covered the British
history there. Fun stuff.

By the way, I googled myself (that somehow feels dirty) and came across your
journal page (http://novak.livejournal.com/181666.html). Fucking
hilarious. Is that verbatim? How did you record all that? Your line re: Lang
nonlinearity and JP forsightlessness (couldn't resist) is forever a classic. I
have less clarity in my memory banks about the George Harrison line which is
really funny though. Thanks for capturing those moments. Nice work historian!!!

Anyway, my article came out in Momentum magazine. Unfortunately, its not online
and I don't have an electronic version of it yet. I'll keep you posted though.

Hope all is well. Let's talk soon.

E

So, that more-or-less was really a reply to the Feb. 15th journal entry, but as Erik is one of those friends who hasn't yet been converted to LJ, I get comments via email. I know, this probably wasn't entry-worthy, but for me it was the right stuff by the right friend at the right moment in the day. Too bad he's at Boston College and that we haven't laid eyes on each other for 2 1/2 years now....

In subsequent note exchanges, he told me about this conference that he's attending on Monday there at BC. Catholic Politicians in the U.S.: Their Faith and Public Policy: A Panel Discussion. How cool would that be? With

Tim Russert
Managing editor and moderator of Meet the Press and political analyst for NBC Nightly News and the Today show
James Carville
CNN political commentator and former senior political adviser to President Clinton
E.J. Dionne
Washington Post columnist and senior fellow at The Brookings Institute
Edward W. Gillespie
Founder and co-chairman of Quinn Gillespie & Associates and former chairman of the 2004 Republican National Committee
Peggy Noonan
Best selling political author and contributing editor to The Wall Street Journal

I see on the webpage for the event that I linked above--and the hosting Church in the 21st Century Center at BC looks fascinating in itself--that they'll stream the event later in the week, so I'll be able to at least watch it. But I would really love to be able to interact with a set of folks like this who have such a capacity for influencing the shape of public discourse. As I wrote to Erik, "This is the type of event where I would really love to be able to interact with these players, and maybe even have an effect that you could see on TV and thus into public discourse on my current quixotic quest to try to break people out of using "Left" and "Right" discourse--and thinking--which I've decided is now just self-defeating and intrinsically distorting."

I rather enjoy Tim Russert's work on Meet The Press, and I've seen him host round-table discussions of religious leaders or pundits on matters of religion in public and political discourse that really raised the standard of such discussions from what one normally sees in the media. Whether you have overly-enthusiastic but narrow-focused or ill-informed spokespersons for religious interests, or whether you have prejudiced and ignorant Secularists who assume with their smattering of Freud and Marx that all spiritual persons are evil, right-wing morons and all religious discourse is idiocy, the result is the perpetuation of the kind of nonsense that tends to dominate the airwaves. The news media should be able to foster something at a higher level, and I've been impressed with Russert's ability to moderate such venues and his ability to be a reasonably-informed non-specialist in theological/philosophical/spiritual matters. So I'd be jazzed to be Erik and to be able to participate in this event. Erik has been doing such progressive organizational work for schools and social services of the Archdiocese of Boston as part of his Psychology doctorate at Boston College that he could make some cool contributions at the event, too. So I'll have to watch once they post it.

So different when I was there....

An article about that odd American.

Britons Dedicate Renovated Franklin Home

Jan 17, 2:41 PM (ET)

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) - Benjamin Franklin, Londoner. The U.S. founding father lived in the British capital for almost two decades before the American Revolution, working to bridge the widening gap between the colonies and the crown. After decades of neglect and a $5.3 million restoration, his house was unveiled to the public Tuesday as a museum dedicated to a revolutionary who spent years trying to keep Britain and its American colonies united.

"He wasn't very successful, but he sowed the seeds of the Anglo-American special relationship," said Marcia Balisciano, director of the Benjamin Franklin House museum.

U.S. Ambassador Robert H. Tuttle and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw cut a red, white and blue ribbon Tuesday - the 300th anniversary of Franklin's birth - to formally open the 18th-century brick home.

The house where Franklin worked, did scientific experiments and invented a musical instrument called the glass armonica will be open by appointment beginning Wednesday. Regular hours start in February.

Franklin lodged in the four-story brick building just off Trafalgar Square from 1757-1762 and from 1764-1775, acting as a diplomat on behalf of American colonists.

( Read more... )

No Place Like Home: Papal Apartment Gets Extreme Makeover

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- When he was elected last April, Pope Benedict XVI inherited the papal apartment on the top floor of the Apostolic Palace, but it wasn't until Christmas that the pope could really call it home.

The apartment, about 10 rooms in all, underwent a three-month renovation this fall. Electrical wiring was replaced, new pipes were installed, the kitchen was refurbished and a custom-fitted private library was put in place.

It was "Extreme Makeover: Vatican Edition." And while the pope didn't whoop or jump up and down at the unveiling, he made it clear he was pleased with the results.

"I can only admire the things you've done, like these beautiful floors," he told the more than 200 architects, engineers and workers involved in the remodeling project.

"I really like my new library, with that antique ceiling. For me it's like being surrounded by friends, now that there are books on the shelf," he said.

The floors were the original 16th-century marble slabs and inlay, restored to their original luster. The library solved the problem of where to put the pope's 20,000 books, which he did not want to leave in storage somewhere.

Details of the remodeling were considered secret, but they emerged in the sideways fashion typical of the Vatican. When Bruno Bartoloni, a veteran Vatican correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, went to have his hair cut recently, he found himself seated next to a talkative member of the restoration team.

The renovation, the workman related, was long overdue. The architects said they were surprised at the poor state of the apartment.

For one thing, the electrical system was not up to code. Some rooms still used old 125-volt electrical outlets, which were phased out years ago in Italy in favor of 220 volts. The water pipes were encrusted with rust and lime, and the heating system was approximate at best.

Above the false ceiling, workers discovered big drums placed strategically to catch the leaks from the roof; some were nearly full of water.

( Read more... )

Over in the basement of Cudahy Hall, 4:30am, taking a brief break. I finally realized what has been nagging at me about this place as I've spent the last week doing my reading over here since the library is closed nights during the break: it kind of reminds me in its layout of the Novice Quarters in the White Tower on Tar Valon in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time--the way they're laid out around a courtyard. Weird to realize that the thing tickling in the back of my mind was a "memory" of a place that I'd read about in a work of fiction.

Reading Von Balthasar's little gem of a book, A Theology of History. There's all sorts of things worth sharing and playing with here, but I thought that I'd at least mention another one that I found interesting in light of all the discussion going on about The Passion of the Christ:

"If man even in his earthly state of subjection to death can find rest and room to move in the sphere of the true, the good and the beautiful which lies above him, how much richer in interior spaciousness must have been that mode of time which belonged to the Son, even while he walked resolutely toward that which was his Father's hour." (p. 36, footnote)

The whole book is a constant reflection on Christ in time. After hanging out with the Freeks in my Notre Dame years, all of whom were constantly writing songs about time (although I'm not sure if they recognized what a common theme that was running through so much of their music, with great variety), I've become really alert to the sheer experience of time. This book is laden with that same sensitivity, and I've found that as far as "spiritual reading" for Lent goes, this assignment has been astounding for giving me that opportunity. There are times--lots of times--when I simply can't read because the feeling of the Spirit is so insistent that I have to divert my attention there.

So... lots of things I could meditate on, but I should get back to it. Great stuff on how Christ is the solution to the theological/philosophical problem of universals: it gave me a flashback to the sheer, awe-inspiring excitement of realizing that reading Plato as an undergraduate: that Christ was the ultimate Form, but was immanent in history as well as transcendental--everything in life suddenly being tied together in one great dance.... Fabulous. One last passage and image (my favourite from the last page I read):

"The same Spirit who was sent by the Father to bring about the Incarnation of the Son by overshadowing the mother now perfects his work by quickening that same flesh. And not the least perfect aspect of his work is that by his power the flesh thus spiritualized by him enters anew into the womb of "the woman" (Rev. 12), who has now become the spiritual and universal bride, the Church." (p. 93)