Scotland

11/26/14, “Scotland”

New York, New York

In 24 hours, I will be at Newark Liberty International Airport on my way to Indira Gandhi International Airport.  I will spend 48 hours in India.  The reason I am going to India is quite simple: to take a picture with my water bottle and a cigar in front of the Taj Mahal.  That is not a joke.  That is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  I am flying halfway around the world and spending a fair chunk of change for that one picture.  Why?  Fulfillment value.  The Taj Mahal is one New7 Wonders of the World, and I am determined to see each of the 7 before I turn 30.  Irrational?  Hell no.

I will attempt to see seven World Heritage Sits plus Parliament in my brief time there, but only one thing matters: that picture in front of the Taj Mahal.  Well, that, and the replica.  I will return to Newark around 5 AM on Monday and go straight to the office.  I will add the replica to my desk and, if I can find it, the flag pin to my push board.  I will distribute some gifts, and then I will forget about India.  Assuming I get that picture and the replica, it will be decades before I return to India.

This is in such contrast to the last time I was at Newark.  Correction, the last time was the Redwoods.  The time before that, however, I was flying back from Edinburgh.  I love Scotland.  It is one of my favorite places in the world.  How do I describe the beauty of the highlands to someone who has only seen it in pictures?  How do I explain the feeling of walking out of the airport in Glasgow into the rain and aptly quoting Braveheart about good Scottish weather?  How do I tell someone who has only watched Mamma Mia how fun it is to call your brother from Glasgow and then sing the appropriate line from Super Trouper?

How do you explain to someone what it’s like to be in the land where your favorite play was set?  How do you explain to someone the feeling when you look at a castle in Edinburgh as the sunlight hits it in a magical way and know that you are looking at Hogwarts?  How do you explain to someone what it’s like to quote Braveheart ad nauseam once you walk into the castle and see a statue of William Wallace?  How do you explain to someone why that first glass of malt whiskey tastes so much better in its homeland than it ever did in a bar in New York?  You can’t.

All you can do is tell them to go to Scotland for themselves, and when you tell them that that, you cannot help but want to return  yourself, not because you need to visit another WHS, not because you want to gain fulfillment value, but because you want to go back, because you want to gain enjoyment value.  You return because you want to relive Macbeth: The Experience, because you want to go to Fife and Inverness, because you want to revisit the highlands, because you want sit in that castle in Edinburgh and read Harry Potter, because you want to go to the University of Edinburgh and sit in the courtyard and read and debate Hume, because you want to have another sip of whiskey in its home.

These were the thoughts that rushed into my mind as I began to read Hume a week ago.  Well, once I got over the brilliance of his writing, then I started to remember how much I loved Scotland.  He is the most brilliant philosopher I have ever read, and it is no surprise to me that he is from one of my favorite places in the world.  I cannot wait until I return.

Vienna

11/12/14, “Vienna”

New York, New York

When people see my passport, they always ask the same questions.  “Do you meet any interesting people?” (“Not if I can help it.  I travel to observe culture and see natural and historic sites.”) “What were your favorite places?”  (“Oh, there are too many to choose from, so many favorites.”)  “Any place you’d want to go back to?”  Now, that is the more interesting question, and it is one that bears a thought out answer.  While places like Quebec and London never get old, that is not the answer.  No, the answer would be to go somewhere I briefly visited and visit it in a new and different way.

I’d love to go back to Athens and spend a week there, working on my philosophy, sitting in the agora every day, drinking wine every night, finding the intellectual heirs of Plato and Aristotle, engaging in a symposium with those who still know what that word means.  I would like to go back to an island in the Caribbean, a small one like Antigua or St. Lucia, and write a short novel, interact with the locals, and not spend a single minute on the beach.  I would like to go back to one of my favorite National Parks and camp out for a week.  I would like to go to the woods and live deliberately as Thoreau did.

However, now, as I sit in my chair, listening to my Music History CD, puffing on a Dunhill and sipping some wine, I have come up with another idea.  I want to go back to Vienna and spend a week there, experiencing everything the city has to offer.  I want to go to every musical performance I can find.  I want to see operas and concerts and listen to Vivaldi and Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven with headphones as I walk around the city.  I want to fall asleep to Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and wake up to Beethoven’s Fifth.  I want to go to bookstores and pick up books and CDs about lesser known composers and go back to my hotel room to read their biographies and listen to their music.  Then I want to drink Vienna coffee and eat sacher torte every night.

I want to play The Blue Danube and waltz down the street for no reason at all.  I want people to look at me like I’m crazy as I pretend to conduct Haydn’s symphonies.  I want to fly home with a clear vision in my mind of 18^th Century Vienna when it was the capital of the world.  I don’t want to take a single picture.  When people ask me if I enjoyed my trip, I want to honestly answer that I loved every minute of it.  I want to be able to be able to play my favorite pieces as clearly in my head as I can my favorite Taylor Swift songs.  When I get back, I want to go to Avery Fisher Hall and listen with fond memories of my time in Vienna.  I want to never be able to hear one of those pieces again without remembering the exact moment I heard it in Vienna.

So, when people ask me my favorite places, I do have set answers.  Favorite city in the world: New York.  Second favorite: London.  Second favorite in the US: Philadelphia.  Favorite city in continental Europe: Vienna.  I am already in love Vienna.  I just to want to fall as deeply in love with it as I am with New York.

As the Leaves Fall

11/10/14

Aboard Metro North 522, En Route to Grand Central Terminal, Harlem Line

As the leaves fall, as we make our way to work or school or home or to see our loved ones, as we walk and bike and drive and ride the train, we look at the changing colors with wonder, the natural progression from summer to winter, the beauty that is to be found in death.  Because we have lived here all of our lives, we do not realize that we are experiencing the Eighth Natural Wonder of the World.  How can the Paricutin Volcano or the Harbor of Rio De Janeiro compare to the changing of the leaves that engulf this entire region of the world in splendid color.  The fall foliage of the northeast, one of the most remarkable annual events, from New York to New Brunswick, from Connecticut to Quebec, there can be no argument made that it is not one of the most beautiful natural phenomena in the world.

However, since we have lived here all of our lives, since we are blessed by this sight every year, since we know nothing else, we simply say, “Look how pretty.”  We may talk about how it is the most beautiful time of the year, how our small home town has come to look like a little taste of Colonial New England, but when the snow falls, as the Christmas decorations go up, we will take pictures of our town covered in snow and sing, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” and we will mean it.  We will get into the Christmas spirit and sing all the songs, decorate our houses, and when the big day comes around, we will spend the day with our families and talk about how joyous of an occasion it is.  We will then ring in the New Year, whether in our homes, at Times Square, in Quebec or Vienna, or aboard a cruise in Antarctica.  We will smoke cigars and drink champagne and sing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of our drunken voices.  We will stumble home at 2 in the morning, and we will watch the Honeymooners until the sun comes up, or we will see what some strange new city has to offer for the New Year.  The next day will come, and we nurse our hangovers.

Then we will start to complain about the cold.  We will never complain about the snow, as we will now be saying the snowfall is more beautiful than the fall foliage ever was, but we will complain about the cold.   As the snow starts to melt, we will be glad for the warmth, trumpeting how we survived the harsh winter, saying how much we hate the winter.  Once the flowers start to bloom, once the birds start to chirp, we will talk of the wonder of spring, we will look at the trees in our garden and say that this is the most beautiful time of the year.  How could snowfall or fall foliage possibly compare to these flowering trees?  We will pot our plants and change our wardrobe and talk of how excited we are for summer.  We will plan our summer vacations and wait for school to end.

When summer comes, we will enjoy long days and, when we have dinner outside at 8:30 PM, with no need for artificial light, we will say how there is nothing like long summer nights.  We will say that the fall foliage and the snowfall and the flowering plants were nothing compared to the beauty of a summer night.  We may even travel further north, to Alaska or Canada or Greenland or Scotland or Scandinavia, where it never truly gets dark, where the sun sets at 11 PM and rises again a few hours later, leaving only twilight in its stead.  We will talk about how taking a walk at 2 AM in twilight is the most wonderful thing in the world, how the fall foliage in New England, New Year’s in Vienna, and the flowering plants in our garden cannot possibly compare to these long summer nights.

Then the leaves will fall again, and we will once more say that fall is the most beautiful time of the year.