August 15, 2013

The airplane’s aura…

The airplane’s aura…

In just a couple of weeks, I will begin a much anticipated journey.  My first destination will be Barcelona, Spain, with its wealth of art, architecture, and history.  After a week in Barcelona, I plan to rent a car and spend another week driving around northern Spain and southern France, particularly the Dordogne and some of the sites of mankind’s earliest artistic creations.  Then it will be back to Barcelona and a long flight to Kathmandu, Nepal, where I have spent so many treasured days in recent years.

When I was still teaching cultural anthropology, I found it curious that students always assumed that one of the greatest advantages of the invention of agriculture was that it permitted human beings to “settle down.”  And yet… how we love to travel!  Nothing stimulates the human mind more directly and completely than the experience of new places, new people, new experiences.  Nothing enlarges our sense of ourselves more than the adoption of multiple “homes” – multiple places where we know the ways of the “natives” and know our way around the country.  In this journey, I will encounter many new places and revisit some familiar ones.

It all begins very soon.