Compulsively Aimless

During the last week of December, my family and I traveled to Barcelona and Madrid. Before we went, I took a look around my library to collect what existing books I had about Spain. It was an irregular assortment. Most of them turned out to be my father's.  My parents traveled to Europe in 1970 and each picked a country: my mother picked England and my father picked Spain. Here's my limited assortment.  Spain , Jan Morris (Oxford University Press, 1979).  Morris provides a concise biography of the country through selective samples of people and places.  By the end, he's given a flavorful portrait of the country. Picked up at the State Department used book store. Spain , Nikos Kazantzakis, (Simon and Schuster 1963).  Divided into two parts, it is a very different book from Jan Morris's.  Kazantzakis writes portraits of Spanish cities through people he meets in his travels.  The second part of the book presents Spain through the eyes of Don ...

  Peter Matthiessen writes with at a level above most travel writers, or most writers period. In his quest to find the rare and elusive Snow Leopard in the Himalayas, he takes us on the physical journey but also weaves in a second journey of the spiritual. Matthiessen was also a former CIA officer, naturalist, zen teacher, and co-founder of the Paris Review. His observations on time and spirit of place are enough to make the reader seriously contemplate conversion to the zen way. His developed zen sensibility makes for insightful observations of time written in almost a prose-poetry. A critic once asked Beethoven to explain one of his pieces and Beethoven simply sat down and played the piece for him. Likewise, there are elements of Matthiessen that are better shown than explained. Here are a few favorites: "Wind flows snow from the pristine points that glisten in the light and there are magic colors in the clouds that sail across the peaks on high blue journeys....

The flag is wool with forty-eight stars, and forty feet by twenty feet.  There’s a color picture from 1920 of my grandmother under the flag hung vertically waiving a slight breeze from a limestone archway.  My grandmother was posed at the entrance of her family home, the residence of her father, Dr. John Tennyson Haynes, the Commandant of the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Home of Sandusky, Ohio.  Even though the picture is a moment frozen in time, the flag waves with one corner of its stripes—one senses the air and flag wafting about my grandmother. The flag linked generations. My great grandfather was the son of Dr. Moses Haynes who had served in the Civil War as an army surgeon for the 69th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. John Haynes had followed in his father’s footsteps and become an Army doctor who was appointed at the turn of the 20th Century to manage the Soldiers and Sailors Home. The Soldiers and Sailors Home was a type of Veterans Affairs hospital established for veterans ...

I want two things from that cloud: rain and dreams. *** He collected the empty whiskey bottles from the dumpster out back hoping he could distill from them the conversations they fueled. *** Some have death following them others have boredom. *** Drunk on words he generated near nonsense combinations that lived in the outskirts of the galaxy of meaning Mathematicians held the center  with their equations and as he ventured further out in the tendrils of meaning the transition from numbers to words it was a lonely space  without gravity. *** I asked the flight attendant  would it be greedy to have  water and coffee. She said, “not greedy but needy.” *** The Day that Changed the World! Well, technically that’s every day. She raised an Cambridge eyebrow at an Oxford comma *** How would you know you’re living in the past? It might not be until later when a future archeologist discovers your bones. **** It’s the best! It’s the worst! followed by a hearse. *** Th...