the poetry in learning
(via BB)
Back when I was an unattached single lad with no children and a disposable income, I was lucky enough to go to Greece -- twice. Once with my family, who had saved up a lot of money so that we could go on a summer home from college, and once after I'd left law school, as a way of partying and getting sunburned on a 40-foot yacht out in the Aegean: to make up for the lost summer I denied myself (listen to my overprivileged ass -- sheesh! As if I'm entitled to a "lost summer", anyway) once I got out of college.
Both times, these trips formed indelible impressions on my consciousness, and, from reading all this, you might expect my memories to be a hazy collection of drunken partying memories (well, there's one involving a lot of vodka and a watermelon), but 90% of them are about the small-r romantic connotations I still attach to the place.
I remember hiking around the ruins of Minoan civilization on Crete.
I keep a running tally in my head of places in the world where God, if such a force exists at all, has touched down and graced the world with sheer timelessness, where you can see the unfolding of time itself in front of you, surrounded on all sides by stunning beauty, so much so that you're almost overcome, but not quite.
The austere California coast, just outside of Cayucos, is like that. The windswept pines and rolling surf command you to take off your shoes and walk in the sand, and you don't even know you're doing it at all until the cold surf washes over your feet. I always remember being a little kid there, making sand castles out of dripped sand from my fingers, and going to sleep in the beach house of a family friend, the surf lingering in my ears.
There is also the Buddhist temple at Chiang Mai, which is in part a tourist stop for the region but holds just enough power to still affect you there. It sits above the clouds on its mountaintop, where monks and tourists alike can watch the river go to the sea.
A place in Greece is like that, too. It's the temple to Poseidon at Sounion, in fact just a short bus ride from the highly polluted center of Athens itself. It's a very small ruin -- no bigger than a small fragment of facade, three columns wide. But it's on a very high cliff, surrounded on three sides by nothing but endless sea and bright, bright sky, except for the massive tanker ship that you'll see far off in the distance. The timelessness is in the graffiti you'll see on the ruin: you'll see lovers' mash notes in Magic Marker from 1981, right next to infantrymen's scratched names from one of Napoleon's many European campaigns, right to the exact date: 1803. The sun will be setting then, and the tourists will have long since gone to one of the more interesting stops on one of the many tours, leaving you to baffle in wonderment at the continuum of history and life in front of you.
My second trip to Greece was more of a glorified booze cruise, but there were dolphins every so often, and we did get the chance to put down at various dots in the Aegean, most of which may not show up on any maps.
However, we did visit Chios, among other islands.
It's so nice to know that the timelessness, and the living world, was surrounding me -- even below the surface outside Chios -- even as I was filling watermelons with vodka and sleeping in a hammock under the stars, in the security of my overprivileged, carefree world.