As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter
Then turn, then fall to sleep.
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure
When one is gone and far.
"That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looed for the best in others and gave the best he had."
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
"Every year I live I am more convinced that the waste of life lies in the love we have not given, the powers we have not used, the selfish prudence that will risk nothing, and which, shirking pain, misses happiness as well. No one ever yet was poor in the long run for having once in a lifetime 'let out all the length of all the reins.'"
"Isn't it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?
Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
and each must make
A stumbling-block
Or a stepping stone."
"Today is, for all we know, the opportunity and occasion of our lives. On what we do or say today may depend the success and completeness of our entire life-struggle. It is for us, therefore, to use every moment of today as if our very eternity were dependent on its words and deeds."
Olympia, Greece was of course the site for the ancient Olympic games. Now, since I'm only about two weeks away from starting to teach Western Civ again, I don't really feel like expounding to the point of writing a history lesson about it just yet... But I will post some of the more interesting photos with some thoughts on them.
So, some highlights... Firstly, we have the only circular temple on the site, started by Philip II of Macedon and completed by his son Alexander the Great, called appropriately the Philippeion. While quite unusual, it nevertheless evinces what I expected to see from the site, I guess... the subtle elegance of the ancients. (Even if it had all been painted up gaudier than Las Vegas at the time!)
And of course we have a distant descendant of the Olympic Games that we celebrate today. When we do, the famous Olympic flame is actually lit here, on the ruins of the former Altar of Hera (pictured at left) using a parabolic mirror. And what visit to Olympia would be complete with a visit to the Stadium (at right)?
Even though I took hundreds of photos in Athens, they were easier to weed through than I thought!
In part, we had far too little time in the city... only about 7 hours. Combining that with the fact that we were with our Athenian friend Vangelis meant that no local taxi driver would pick us up to take us to the Acropolis because he would have to charge us the "normal" fare! Seriously... we were rejected by like a dozen cab drivers - and it just got funnier every time - who were on their way to the golden goose which is the cruise ship. (Pretty quickly, I learned the Greek for "no"... oshi!)
So, in the end, we only had enough time to see the Acropolis and the new Acropolis Museum. And there's practically no way to take a photo of the iconic Parthenon without it being totally cliched... So, I'll teach with those photos and won't bother posting them on Flickr or here. But what I will share are some photos from our cool trip through the Athens metro! Yes, you read that right... the lowly subway!!
Needless to
say, you can't dig a hole in downtown Athens without hitting something of historical value. As a result, in an unprecedented move, teams of archeologists worked alongside the metro engineers for a total of six years, uncovering a staggering 32,000 artefacts in the process! The end result is not only a greater knowledge of Athens' buried history, but also metro stations which double as museums! Totally cool.
So, here are some glimpses of these clever exhibits at the Acropolis and the Syntagma Square metro stations... As you can see from the Acropolis stop above, a number of the artefacts (or their reproductions if they're simply too valuable) are on display, including the ancient Greek plumbing (!) and ancient toys exhibited at the Syntagma station.
But at Syntagma they've done even more. Since subways by definition provide a great cross-section of the substrata beneath a city, they've displayed this behind a glass wall... so you can see perfectly well the ancient necropolis which originally occupied that site.
Complete, by the way, with an open grave and a skeleton in it! (I am assuming this is a reproduction, but I can't swear to it...)
Now why can't Rome do the same thing???
Again, jumping around out of order, photos from the beautiful whitewashed tourist trap that is the Greek island of Mykonos are now up in my Flickr photostream (and in my sidebar slideshow at right!)
Whew, that's pretty much it for the modern cities... now I have to face fixing up the hundreds of photos from classical Athens, Olympia and Delos!!
A little out of order in presenting my vacation pics, but it was actually easier to start the weeding out process with the ones from the island of Corfu'. A handful of new holiday snaps are thus now available in my Flickr photostream (visible in the slideshow in the sidebar).
More to come...
Dr. V and the Splendour of the Seas in Corfu'
It's always a hoot to look through old issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, and with Google Books you can now do just that! But what do you get if you mix an eternally medieval city with eternally hopeful futurists? You get these mags' interesting take on Venice! Through their pages, you see the 20th century slowly but surely arrive to the canal city (or not, as sometimes the case may be...)
As you can see from the pictures, the articles ranged from the ridiculous (at left) to the strangely poignant from World War I below.
For more on Vintage Venice, see my post over at Metafilter...
I wanted to pose for it from behind the fishtank but they wouldn't let me!
(Just kidding...)
I've been living in Venice each and every summer for the last 16 years, and I've NEVER encountered the (in)famous so-called "stinky" canals of Venice. As far as I'm concerned, Venice smells no better or no worse than any other coastal city during the summer.
Nevertheless, I was not particularly broken up about the fact that I couldn't take that fragrance home with me. I couldn't, that is, UNTIL NOW!
That's right... there's now (drumroll please!) "Remembering Venice: The Fragrance"! Yes, you too can now enjoy the bottled smells of Venice long after you've left the lagoon city, all for a mere $113!!
Yesterday, I caught the ferry boat that takes cars to Venice's beach island, the Lido. It passes through the wide Giudecca canal that forms the underbelly of the city, where you can get some unparallelled great Venetian views!
To wit, in one fell swoop, you can get a spectacular gander of not one BUT THREE churches designed by the virtuoso Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio!
As proof, I've uploaded to Flickr these shots of mine taken of the gleamingly gorgeous sixteenth-century white marble churches of San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle, and the Redentore. Enjoy!!
One source of great treasure troves of information for studying history is diaries. In fact, the more minutia recounted in them the better for the subsequent historians who try to piece together as much as possible the daily reality of people's lives, like in the famous case of 17th-century England's Samuel Pepys or turn-of-the-16th-century Venice's Marin Sanudo. (From that point though it's not always clear how to make sense of it all, but Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's analysis of colonial Maine midwife Martha Ballard's diary, resulting in the wonderful book A Midwife's Tale, is a great lesson in how to do precisely that!)
I don't know whether to envy or pity future historians who will look back upon the early 21st century and its embarrassment of diary riches resulting from social web. Personally, I don't pretend to be a diarist with the meticulousness of Pepys, Sanudo or Ballard, but I realized that I'm doing much the same kind of thing on Twitter. In fact, in a bit more than a year, I've posted 2000 updates or "tweets." Some are more interesting than others, but it's nevertheless a collection of 140-character snapshots of my life and my interests in that time.
So, thanks to PrintYourTwitter, here is the first part of my Twitter-Diary for 2008-2009. (As you'll see, for a while I was cross-posting from Facebook, which is where I put a lot of history news for my students, so it's a great reprise of the history headlines from that period!)
Gorgeous collection of photos capturing the Pakistani tradition of elaborately decorating their vehicles. According to Drive Line:
The most striking thing in Pakistan is the vision of trucks and buses completely covered in a riot of color and design. They might spew diesel fumes, they may take up all of the winding, narrow, under-maintained road one is trying to negotiate, but they are certainly noticeable, like so many mechanical dinosaurs adorned in full courtship colors.
The decoration of vehicles is a common practice in a number of countries in addition to Pakistan. Similar techniques and materials are employed in truck and (more frequently) bus decoration in the Philippines, Indonesia, and several countries in Central and South America; in South Asia itself, Indian trucks are painted, as are the scooter rickshaws, called "Baby Taxis", of Bangladesh. What makes the case of Pakistan unique, however, is the pervasiveness of vehicle decoration, since decoration is heavily utilized on virtually all privately and fleet-owned commercial vehicles, from the well known trucks and buses, to vans, share taxis, animal carts and even juice vendors' push carts.
The motifs on the trucks can be categorized in five groups:1. Idealized elements of life, such as the romanticized village, landscapes or beautiful women.2. Elements from modern life, such as pictures of political figures or patriotic symbols.3. Talismanic and fetish objects, such as horns, yak tails and items of clothing.4. Talismanically or religiously loaded symbols, such as eyes and fish.5. .Obvious religious symbols and images such as Buraq (a celestial horse that is believed to have carried the Prophet Muhammad on a spiritual journey to heaven).
However, by far the commonest religious symbols appearing on a truck are the Ka'ba and Prophets mosque, appearing on the left and right of the front of the truck somewhere towards the top.
