San Sebastián, Spain, June 2024
Sun Lakes, Washington, USA. June, 2014.
Örebro, Sweden. November 2016.
Uplifting story: the reopening of Notre Dame de Paris will happen next weekend, five years after the devastating fire. The magnitude of the restoration and extraordinary fidelity to the original building is breathtaking. The work showcased what a unifying common purpose can achieve, in the same way the Apollo program marshaled the US to a bold vision more than 60 years ago.
Underway right now: solo sailing race around the world, started with 40 boats, now 39, heading for the Cape of Good Hope and next the perils of the Indian Ocean.
Xi’an, China, 2018. A midnight tour on foot under light snow. “It’s late. I’m tired. It’s cold,” wasn’t accepted. George, my colleague from Shanghai, wanted to share the rich history of this ancient Silk Road city. It was magically quiet.
En Route to Los Nevados National Park and the peak of Santa Isabel in the Colombian Andes, 1995. We rode in the back of “Narco Willy”, a 4WD vehicle of a type favored by traffickers, but with completely bald tires. 
My Colombian hosts squeezed everything out of the Willy it was able to give. 
Prague, Thanksgiving 1993. A lively group of ex-pats and Czech locals got together to share the traditional foods and a postprandial stroll by the river.
Frau Clauson taught me the German language. She was a high school teacher of great renown in my home town, having singlehandedly created an exchange program that brought more than 1000 German and American kids into each other’s homes, schools and lives.
More importantly than just the language, Frau Clauson imparted an appreciation for German and European culture. In our senior year, she led the class through a fast-clip review of grammar and then plunged us into European history, art, music, architecture and literature from Roman to modern times. Her lectures were delivered in German and to this day there are some architectural terms I know only in that language.
My appreciation for her panoramic introduction to European history and culture has deepened over time. It gave me scaffolding on which to build my experiences while traveling and to forge deeper understanding from what I read, heard and saw while visiting museums and concerts, reading a good book, or meeting new people.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe isn’t well known in the US. In Germany, his works have the broad renown of a Shakespeare or Charles Dickens in the anglophone world. German schoolchildren memorize his poems, his quotations are on everyone’s tongue, and his original thoughts are a substrate in casual discourse. In the US we might know the story of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or Faust, without being conscious of the source.
Sometime in the 1980’s a German friend gave me at cassette recording by a actor reciting a narrative about Goethe’s life interspersed with his poems. The performer was Lutz Görner. The perfect diction and beautiful cadence of the readings, Görner’s resonant and expressive voice were completely captivating, to say nothing of the poems by Goethe and the fascinating story of his life. I listened to that cassette hours and hours and ended up memorizing several of the poems, in the course of which I vastly improved my pronunciation of German, too.
I am saddened to see Lutz Görner left us this year. We can still find a version of the Goethe cassette recitation on YouTube (Part 1), and I’m sure are other performances.
For a non-native reader, Goethe’s poems deliver a double pleasure when read in German. One can first marvel at the condensed streams of human emotion made confluent by so keen a hand. And then marvel at the dense delivery marshaled by the language itself.
Breitest über mein Gefild
Lindernd deinen Blick
Wie des Freundes Auge mild
Über mein Geschick.
How to cast that in English? How to achieve the balance and economy, the nuanced associations and plunging depth?
The story of Goethe’s life can be found online. Read it to begin an appreciation for a dazzling flower of the Enlightenment we can all flock around. Goethe’s childhood home can still be visited in Frankfurt, as well as his home in Weimar.
Thank you again, Frau Clauson.
El Nabatat or Kitchener’s Island, Aswan, Egypt, 1994. The magical botanical gardens attracted throngs of happy Egyptians in the January off-season.
The Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji.
