Glenda Burgess

In travel, as in most exertions, timing is everything.
- Paul Theroux, "The Pillars of Hercules"

A good book is the kindest of companions. It accompanies one through airports, ferries and waiting, the inevitable delays and rain, cafes and sleepless nights, sunny shores and sweet mornings, shiny as new pennies. I happened upon such a wondrous book - now dog-eared and creased, pages fat from days of arid hikes followed by sea-going humidity, ably ringed in coffee stains - in the travelogue penned by Paul Theroux, THE PILLARS OF HERCULES (Fawcett Books, 1995).

A prolific and gifted novelist and essayist, Theroux is no stranger to journeys of open-minded discovery. His book was everything I wanted in a book to accompany me on a journey through the middle Mediterranean. A study of ancients: from the Spanish Steps of Rome to Pompeii, skimming the Amalfi Coast, touching Capri, exploring ancient Sicily to at last sail on to that pivot of ancient maritime history, the Island of Malta. A "Grand Tour" (within the given limits of modern work schedules) to explore these ancient shores and empires long gone, the temple remnants that stand alone, washed in watercolor sunsets. Prehistory 3600BC to citizens of Pompeii crouching in tombs of volcanic ash; from the artistic and architectural lineage of Greek and Roman temples to the scintillating hidden waters of the Blue Grotto.

Although it is a fat book, a good three inches, the essays span Theroux's explorations beginning at the mouth of Gibraltar following the northern European shores of the Mediterranean, to return to Gibraltar once more; arriving on the opposite shore via the southern Middle Eastern and North African coast (linking the so-called "Pillars of Hercules"). I debated carrying such heft, considered its burden in my pack. But as I explored these ancient lands some 18 years later than Theroux, I found his observations enabled interesting comparisons. Much had changed in the way of modern conflicts and outlook; yet in the geography itself, and its silent mysteries, not much at all. We still stand in the long shadow of the ancients.

I find it absolutely remarkable to come across a ruin older than I can imagine; to speculate on what the object once stood for, outlasted, represents in the modern context. I find it unspeakably touching, for example, that a nameless prehistoric culture on the Island of Malta constructed, with great deliberation, rolling 1200 pound slabs of stone on round boulders of rock, a stone temple with a view to a distant island framed beautifully between the standing pillars of the main altar. I find it moving, in the simplest of contexts, that these people celebrated what is beautiful, the fecund cycles of the equinox, left behind simple stone necklaces and clay figurines. That wherever humans have been, we build, plant, pray and gather around the hearth, leaving our stories behind.

Theroux is a literary wonder: an encyclopedia of literature and history dovetailed with a cynical yet surprisingly genuine ability to be touched, surprised. He is snarky, witty, and absolutely true to the telling detail that delivers the world in glance. I found him a terrific companion on my own curious travels. A point of reference on both modern context and subjective understanding. I will be sharing my own thoughts on my travels in the next few essays, so if you're curious, stay with me over the summer as I ruminate from a 21st Century perspective on the ancient empires.

Which reminds me to note some of the great books I gathered, many from a nifty travel-oriented bookshop, Longitude Books in Plymouth, Minnesota (www.longtiudebooks.com). If you are venturing out yourself, consider any or all of these terrific reads and references:

ON THE SHORES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN, Eric Newby
ON PERSEPHONE'S ISLAND, Mary Taylor Simeti
THE SPIRIT OF MEDITERRANEAN PLACES, Michel Butor
ANCIENT SHORE:DISPATCHES FROM NAPLES, Shirley Hazzard & Francis Steegmuller
D.H. LAWRENCE & ITALY, D.H. Lawrence
ITALY, A TRAVELER'S LITERARY COMPANION, Lawrence Venuti
EVERY DAY IN TUSCANY, SEASONS OF AN ITALIAN LIFE, Francis Mayles
THE MEDITERANNEAN IN HISTORY, edited by David Abulafia

In the last weeks much has happened in America that deeply wounds the heart of all of us. Even if we are distant from the terror attacks at Newtown and the Boston Marathon, from the massive explosions at West, Texas, we feel the pain of the innocent, the victims. Before there is acceptance, before there is forgiveness, there is grieving. I came across this essay from Isadora Duncan from her memoir, My Life, that speaks of inconsolable loss and what we may say or do that offers genuine companionship and solace to those grieving. Duncan lost both of her children in an accident when a taxicab in which they were riding drove off into the water and they were drowned. She then fled to her friend, Eleanora Duse, and stayed with her in Italy.

From MY LIFE

The next morning I drove out to see Duse, who was living in a rose-coloured vila behind a vineyard. She came down a vine covered walk to meet me, like a glorious angel. She took me in her arms and her wonderful eyes beamed upon me such love and tenderness that I felt just as Dante must have felt when, in the "Paradiso," he encounters the Divine Beatrice.

From then on I lived at Viareggio, finding courage from the radiance of Eleanora's eyes. She used to rock me n her arms, consoling my pain, but not only consoling, for she seemed to take my sorrow to her own breast, and I realized that I had not been able to bear thew society of other people, it was because they all played the comedy of trying to cheer me with forgetfulness. Whereas Eleanora said:

"Tell me about Deirdre and Patrick," and made me repeat to her all their little sayings and ways, and show her their photos, which she kissed and cried over. She never said, "Cease to grieve," but she grieved with me, and, for the first time since their death, I felt I was not alone.

- Isadora Duncan, 1878-1927

For deLawd

people say they have a hard time
understanding how I
go on about my business
playing my Ray Charles
hollering at the kids -
seems like my Afro
cut off in some old image
would show I got a long memory
and I come from a line
of black and going on women
who got used to making it through murdered sons
and who grief kept on pushing
who fried chicken
ironed
swept off the back steps
who grief kept
for their still alive sons
for their sons coming
for their sons gone
just pushing

- Lucille Clifton

Today, the haunting notes of YoYo Ma on the cello plays in elegy, the faces and pure voices of the Boston Childrens Chorus rise in song, carrying words they barely understand but certainly feel in the gospel hymnal "To the Mountain." Today we talk about honoring our lost and commit to moving on. The voice of the cello cries "Why?" The prayer surrenders and accepts. The faces of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters turn away. And those of us who can go on, do. We rise and work, we take the children to school, we load the washing machine, chop green beans, hug our husbands and wives and kids because we know, really know, how fragile the thin thread is.

I run today through the cold bright sun. The new green limns the trees. The robin tucks the last straw into her nest. I run because I can and perhaps another cannot. I run because each day it is a gift to do so. I run for Boston, for me, for you. The thin fragile thread. I run because it is my way to pray. My heart beats "Why?"

Feet just pushing.

copper pennies, cattle bones, pavers, wafers, black cloth
The Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin

The image in this essay is of an art installation at The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas that occupies an entire space of its own. A room within a room, in which the art, "How to Build a Cathedral," fills the entirety of the subdued space.

The visitor is permitted to step inside the installation, curtained on four sides by ceiling to floor black mesh curtains (filmy and weighty), and stand or walk the square perimeter of the installation on an interior border of simple gray pavers. The ceiling within is a stalactite "chandelier" of cow bone: white bones suspended in uniform order from the ceiling and lit from above. The bones funnel visually into a thin cord of stacked Eucharist wafers falling into a sculptural sea of shiny new pennies. The space has the sacramental hush and reverence we associate with the interiors of cathedrals and the metaphoric elements with which we erect them: rock, money, sweat and death, sacrament, obscurity, light. It is a beautiful space. It feels sacred. The meaning, if one can say such exists outside the visual, feels immediately and profoundly understood. We make the profound from the material, we imbue the simple with meaning. What is sacred is born of the ordinary.

Does a poem enlarge the world,
or only our idea of the world?
- from "Mathematics" by Jane Hirschfield