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| 7.16.02 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Mist rolling through Swiss mountains, waterfalls like silver threads, diminishing vividness of peaks and profiles.� For me, the importance of traveling is not the things you see, but the thoughts you are able to have while seeing them. Why I prefer to travel alone, and silently.� Seeing Verona like we did was like tasting wine from a paper cup.� To only sit in one of the cafes we passed, and listen to the city speak.� An honestly beautiful thing was the graffiti on the walls under Juliets balcony, solid net of different colored names, and hearts.� Her statue with one breast polished, where tourists for some reason are supposed to touch, grinning, for a picture.� They pay tribute by defiling.� So what if the Roman Arena is an opera house, and Juliet's tomb sells T-shirts?� Verona: it exists apart from, changes, becomes invisible. | ||||||||||||||||||
| 7.17.02 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Last entry was made in St. Moritz, or environs, a ski resort town we'd driven to for one reason or another, probably just the scenery through the window.� Although I flatter myself into thinking I've seen most of nature's tricks to make you draw in breath: lifting herself up as mountains, wrapping herself in clouds and glacial snow, oozing strands along her contours into lakes so clear you can hardly tell where the water begins--although I think now I'm more drawn to the life and variance of cities--Switzerland in her perhaps too organized but awesome beauty knocks me flat.� Driving along the Furkin pass, through an impossible amount of green and height hair-pin turns pinning the hair of mist and snow, radio still somehow picking up signals of music.� I'm in Zermatt, by the Matterhorn, left to my idle devices, and I want to pay for my breakfast, rent a bike, and go out into the light rain falling on the trails of the map I bought for two Swiss francs. | ||||||||||||||||||
| 1936 meters up, a bike trail I didn't mean to take, the old woman with hair on her chin gives me a lemonade, at a little stop on the map called "Zmutt".� "Hier ist Zmutt" she says.� She was so still and smiling as I pushed my bike up the gravel trail, that I thought she was a painting on the back of the little wooden shelter, before she moved.� EtwasKaltzutrinken: citroen lemonade.� Lovely high exhaustion in the mountains.� Beauty usually hangs on the extreme ends of things.� Gross Got. | ||||||||||||||||||
| 7.19.02 �(Lucern) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Reserved respite from the tour of all things touristy, to walk on my own until afternoon.� Because I know cities have prepared answers for easy questions, and the trick is to ask them something that makes them stop and smile.� Rather than sliding through other people's photographs.� City where hotel receptionists have a sense of humor, and swans and ducks swim by the Kopell-brucke.� City swan-like itself, the curved swan neck of bridges, streets that seem calm and peaceful and white, Lucern. | ||||||||||||||||||
| In the Allhambra hall of mirrors, the siegellabrynth, I had this thought: the trick is to always walk where you don?t see your own reflection, towards where nothingness and difference are most strong.� | ||||||||||||||||||
| 7.20.02 | ||||||||||||||||||
| Statue of a wounded lion, and a bed full of mechanical butterflies.� | ||||||||||||||||||