I’m running out of Munich pictures, so you’ll see some Lisbon pictures mixed in with today’s post, which touches on three heavy or philosophical topics.

[Creepy cat in Lisbon graveyard.]

(1) The Germans are, as one would expect, very thorough, and very attentive to rules. One doesn’t cross an empty street if the pedestrian “Walk” light isn’t on. If I show my ID to a museum ticket-seller to get the senior rate, she’s actually going to read the month, day and year of my birthday. When the woman in the grocery-store hands me my bag of food, she admonishes me to hold both handles of the bag lest I spill my purchases. Another woman advised me about how to heat up a Munich-style white hotdog without (auugh!) bursting it. But there’s a cheerful, agreeable quality to all this, a kind of “We’re playing this game together,” attitude.

[Balloon used for lamp fixture in Lisbon church.]

Walking around, I keep admiring how attractive, tidy and cultured the Germans are. In the course of my life, I’ve lived in Germany for about three years, and I’m comfortable here. But, having been away for so long now, I’m also sensitive to the sinister side of Germany—I’m referring of course to the Nazis.

All three of my uncles were officers in the German army—they had no choice but to enlist. My uncle Rudolf von Bitter died on the Russian front, the other two were captured and served time in Russian and English prison camps. My grandfather Rudolf von Bitter is said to have helped the underground resistance against the Nazis. The family sent my mother to America in 1937 so that at least one of them would survive the coming war.

I’m not blindly on the Germans’ side— we even have a few Jewish ancestors far up in our German family tree, and if the Third Reich had gone on indefinitely, my relatives might have ended up in the death camps. Even so, it’s not reasonable to assume that typical Germans are racists and heartless killers—any more than it’s reasonable to think the same about all Americans in the wake of Hiroshima, say, or My Lai.

[A nice patch of wall in Sintra, Portugal.]

But still. Why did the Germans have to act so terribly in the Second World War? It’s undeniable that the Nazis had huge popular support. I found myself wishing that it were somehow possible to change history so that the horror had never happened. I was wishing that my race could be cleared of blood-guilt.

I talked this over with my cousin Rudolf. He, of course, has thought about these questions quite a bit. I’ll condense and paraphrase his remarks.

[Tiled Rossio Square in Lisbon.]

“If you are accused of a crime, or if the group you belong to is accused, it’s better to begin by admitting your guilt. Denial leads nowhere. Hitler is part of the German character. And, yes, we have our fine culture as well, for instance, Goethe. But to imagine that we could somehow keep the Goethe and get rid of the Hitler is a lie. G and H. Next to each other in the alphabet. I also think of Goethe’s story, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice); a meditation on the dark side of intellectual and technological power.”

[Chuch tile with holy candles in Lisbon.]

No real answer.

(2) Looking for things to do that didn’t involve walking, I went to a concert in a former imperial church, a sequence of seven Haydn sonatas based on Jesus’s “Seven Last Words,” these being the seven direct quotes of Him that appear in the Gosper of Saint Luke.

My favorite of these is where the Good Thief says, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus seems to agree with that, and says, “Verily I say unto you, today you shall be with me in paradise.”

[German concert crowd.]

I once had an interesting discussion of this passage with my old science-writer mentor, Martin Gardner. Some religious sects have take the exchange between Jesus and the Good Thief to mean that your soul isn’t in fact immortal on its own, but is, rather, a pattern of information that God stores in His memory so that He can resurrect you. Sometimes the word “soul sleep” is associated with this notion, but if you try Googling or looking in Wikipedia, you find a bewildering gamut of variations on this (heretical by some lights) doctrine.

[Me in Lisbon with a statue of poet Fernando Pessoa]

Keeping it simple, to me the Thief/Jesus exchange suggests that the soul can in fact be represented as software, that is, as a pattern of information that God (or a sufficiently large computer memory) can store.

“Remember me!” What a great request.

(3) On my last day, I rode Rudolf’s bike to the Neue Pinakothek, a Munich museum with 19th and early 20th century art. The Neue Pinakothek had a nice Ferdinand Hodler, shown above, and a couple of good van Goghs. Studying his works in awe, I started thinking it might be fun to try some paintings in which I use enough extra paint to build up an impasto relief of brush strokes.

I always wonder why van Gogh killed himself. Wouldn’t you be happy if you could paint that well? I guess he was out there alone on some kind of unbearable edge. It’s hard to visualize just how crazy some artists are. It occurs to me to do an SF move on van Gogh—that is, to imagine a future kind of art with its own kind of crazy artist. The notion of future art forms fasinates me.

I also noticed an Honore Daumier painting of some excited folks goggling at an onstage drama. Antonio Damasio argues in his book The Feeling of What Happens, that the essence of consciousness is to have, get this, a mental image oneself watching one’s life unfold. At level 1, we simply are em embedded in life, we’re like the actors on the stage. At level 2, we can stand aside a bit, and see life as a spectacle. At level 3, which is where Damasio says consciousness kicks in, we are aware of ourselves as detached observers of life’s passing scene. You’re looking at the Daumier painting of yourself. As I discuss in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, (see the online version of the relevant passage here), all of Damasio’s levels can, at least in principle, be modeled in computer software.

[Egyptian style rings at Gold and Silver Market in the Scwabing district of Munich. Like language tokens.]

After the museum, I sat in their very pleasant outdoor cafe for a long time, eating while reading Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, a book I’d dug up at Rudolf’s apartment—I think his daughter had it assigned for her English class. After two and a half weeks, I was kind of done with doing something touristic every minute. I was edging towards the next level—of simply living abroad.

It had been awhile since I’d read Chandler, and I’d forgotten just how wonderful a writer he is. His use of language is exquisite, as in his thumbnail sketches of his characters’ personalities. And his dialog is wonderful, rife with odd-ball 1930s slang—probably nobody ever really talked that way, but the patois makes for a wonderful seamless level of discourse that holds his worlds together.

From Farewell My Lovely: “I felt like an amputed leg.” “…my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck…”

[Water works building near dam in Los Gatos, California]

Chandler’s slang reminds of the way that I often make up a standard slang for my SFictional worlds. I’ve learned that it works best if the words in this alternate language are short, easily spelled, and easy to say, like the well-polished words in actual human speech. Sometimes one can repurpose an existing word, but it’s often better to invent a previously unused word—if you scratch around a bit, you’ll find there’s really quite a few good and usable syllables that don’t happen to be standard English words. In picking a made-up word, you have to be keenly aware of the word’s associations, that is, if it sounds a bit like some real word.

[Theatiner church in Munich.]

Anyway, my time in Munich finally ran out and, next step, next step, next step, I called a taxi to pick me up at 5 am to take me to the station to catch a suburban train to the airport, etc. And now polishing these notes, I’m looking across my desk at our cozy backyard.

Thank you, Cosmos! It was a good trip.

I went by a favorite little museum of mine, Villa Stuck, the Jugendstil home of this odd turn of the century artist, Franz Stuck.

Stuck was a handsome, sociable man. He seems to have worked his way up, making a career as an artist and architect, marrying a possibly wealthy American woman, being made a noble and becoming “von Stuck,” and teaching art for many years at the Munich art academy, with students such as Paul Klee and Fritz Albers.

Stuck isn’t really the most talented painter—his images are almost like outsider art, filled with idiosyncratic mythological references and slavering eroticism. His 1898 painting, “Die Wippe” (“The Seesaw”) all but shows a pair of women, a blonde and a brunette, sharing a dildo, with one of the women leering and the other blushing and turning her head.

But Stuck was something more than a painter—he was an impresario, perhaps a bit like a Pop artist. He made elaborate, architectural gilded frames for his paintings—particularly for his greatest hit, Die Suende (or “Sin”), which he copied and resold a number of times over. And he used the modernist expedient of photographing models and using those images to lay out his paintings. I like Stuck more than Sylvia does—of his work she once remarked, “Did this guy ever go outside and look at anything real?”

It’s not just the art in Villa Stuck, it’s the building itself, with every surface completely decorated. And upstairs in his studio is a copy of Die Suende atop a huge altar with polished nautilus shells on it. I love artists. Like so many of the buildings in Munich, Villa Stuck had to be restored after World War II.

[Kley’s “The Krupp Works Devils” Click to see larger image.]

The Villa Stuck had an interesting temporary exhibition of works by Heinrich Kley. There was one large and amazing 1913 painting of the Krupp steel mill, Die Krupp’schen Teufel (“The Krupp Works Devils”), with huge demons commingling with the workers—the demons representing, I think, the elemental forces of nature involved in smelting—as opposed to the evils of arms-manufacture. Kley did this work on commission from the Krupp company shortly before World War One.

[Kley’s “Dancing School #1” Click to see larger image.]

In later years, Kley became a regular cartoonist for the legendary journal Simplicissimus, and he did a number of cartoons of animals behaving like people. In 1912, he created a classic comic strip that’s alternately called “Die Tanzschule” (“Dancing School”) or “Die Tanzkurs” (“The Dance Lesson”), in which an Elephant and a Crocodile are learning to do ballet.

[Kley’s “Dancing School #2” Click to see larger image.]

Studying Kley’s “Die Tanzschule” on the wall actually made me laugh out loud. The elephant and the crocodile aren’t merely playful, they want to learn to dance, they’re transported by their motions, and the crocodile howls and sobs with the elephant steps on her tail.

I wish I had better images of “Die Tanzschule”—due to the hypervigilant guards, I had to settle for photographing the rather poor reproduction of this work in the show’s catalog, and then Photoshopping them to look a little better. Note that I did manage to get a shot of the actual canvas of ” Die Krupp’schen Teufel ” as shown further back up the page.

In 1940 “Die Tanzschule” served as an inspiration for part of the ”Dance of the Hours,” scene in the Disney animated film Fantasia. In Villa Stuck, they had a few drawings from the Disney film to drive home this point .

But the crocodiles in the Disney seem witless, each with the same fixed “devilish” smile in the corners of their mouths. And the Disney elephants are too cute. Disney vs. Heinrich Kley is a bit like the low humor of Douglas Adams vs. the heart-piercing wit of the still-insufficiently-recognized grandmaster Robert Sheckley.

Another thing I did in Munich was go to the Krone Circus.

I like circuses anyway, but a European circus seems especially cool, perhaps everyone there is a European local—you pretty much never see another American tourist at the circus.

It was a one-ring circus with elephants, a pair of clowns, and some trapeze artists. There’s no spectacle I love more than acrobat women riding on elephants!

It reminded me of a time about thirteen years ago, when I had a sabbatical, and Sylvia and I bummed around Europe for over five weeks—and we went to this little circus in Vienna, and I had a kind of revelation when I came out. Here’s the passage:

Sunday afternoon, the 27th of September, 1998, there was a strange moment — S and I went to the Circus Roncalli at 3 PM, it was lovely, so full of color and laughter and love. And then we came outside and there was a chill in the air, and some low gray clouds — though still with blue showing through — and some of the leaves on the tree were yellow and it was like all of a sudden it was Fall, and it had come perhaps gradually and we’d been too busy playing to notice, it had been Summer when we left home, but now we’d stayed away so long that it was Fall, us off in a distant city, a feeling of having stayed away longer than I’d realized, and a feeling, too, that, in the great “year” of my life it’s Fall. It turned to Fall while we were at the Circus.

I received no revelation this time, although I did get two or three good photos.

One more outing I managed was to see the München Volkstheater production of the Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weil musical, Der Dreigroschen Oper. (Three-penny Opera). It was cool to be in the huge crowds at the concert, the circus and the play. I had trouble understanding the rapid-fire dialog at the musical, but they had a seven-piece live band, and an amazing rendition of “Mackie Messer,” a song from the play that we know as the pop standard “Mack the Knife”

[ The “Static Man” in Lisbon. Holds Guiness record for motionlessness. Somehow he has a hidden harness that suspends him in air from a cane sticking up from a platform.]

The actor singing “Mackie Messer,” really tore it up. He was sleazy, unshaven, in a powder blue suit with no tie—like an on-the-skids lounge singer, but German as well. I’d almost forgotten this side of the Germans, that is, the expressionist, Grimm-brothers, Cabinet-of-Doctor-Caligari, freak-show, Scorpions heavy-metal aspect.

I left both the circus and the musical before they were over. I was mainly thinking about getting back to cousin Rudolf’s apartment and lying on the couch. Or riding the tram and looking at people on the street. I’ve noticed this before—when I go out to shows alone, I find it hard to sit through the whole thing. It’s not as much fun without someone to share your enjoyment. I recall one of my friends telling me that, after his wife left him, he was unable to go sit through an entire movie in a theater. Perhaps we’re such creatures of the herd that when we’re alone, we feel impelled to range about in the hope of striking up a conversation.

Munich is such a beautiful city. Lots of buildings were bombed in the war, but the Germans have restored it out the wazoo. In spots, Munich is almost like a theme park, although even the new things are build from solid metal and stone. Things are solid and well-proportioned, with lots of trees.

Since I was alone in Munich for much of time time, I wrote more notes and took more pix than in the other spots, so I’ll break this material into several posts, with the tense somewhat randomly oscillating between present and past—which is, I suppose, vaguely appropriate.

The Theatinerkirche in the downtown (in the right on the picture above) was pretty much reduced to rubble, but the Germans put it back the way it used to be.

The Altes Rathaus (old town hall) got destroyed, and was rebuilt in a fairly ugly way, but there’s a gothic-looking Neue Rathaus (new town hall) from 1908 (shown on the left above) that’s pretty cool, although my cousin Rudolf says it’s kitsch in that it imitates being medieval Gothic.

The Altes Rathaus has some wonderful wrought iron, I liked the fairytale-border-illo quality of that frog shown above.

And there’s some great old Jugendstil (that is, German Art Nouveau,) buildings as well.

The apartment block where my cousin Rudolf lives with his family on the fourth floor is Jugendstil, and there’s a cute carved bear on newel post at the bottom of the well-waxed flights of walk-up stairs. Very 1910.

Some amazing buildings in Munich are relatively uncelebrated like, for instance, the Jugendstil lecture hall at the Leopold Maxmillian University. And, like I say, there’s a bunch of amazing Jugendstil houses around, too. I love that stuff. Will we ever find our way back to the wonders of heavily ornamented architecture? Or are we stuck with cheap-ass blank walls for the rest of time?

I’m half-German—my mother was the sister of my Cousin Rudolf’s father. Not that they bore any resemblance to this cartoony old painting of a mermaid and merman.

My cousin Rudolf von Bitter is a smart guy. He’s an author in his own right, with quite a few books—this link searches German Amazon, with a couple of mine sneaking in. He organizes author videos for the Bavarian TV channel. He also has a LiteraVideo webpage with some quirky authorial videos that he’s made on his own.

He drives a beat-up old-style VW beetle, he sought out one made in Mexico for the authentic old-school look. I called it a dreckige Käfer (dirty beetle.) His manner of talking shares a quality of Bruce Sterling’s—you can never quite tell when he’s being sarcastic. We were making dinner plans, and he exclaimed, “Schweinebraten um sechs!” (Roast pork at six o’clock!) I kind of thought he was mocking the eating habits of the average German, but that night he did in fact order Schweinebraten, albeit at seven. He does it, but he mocks it at the same time.

It was good sitting with Rudolf’s family, enjoying the glow of their home, and listening to them, sharing food.

A restaurant where we ate together had a life-sized bronze sculpture of a pig outside. I posed with it, and a drunk Bavarian smoking outside the restaurant said to me, “Schweine gehören zusammen.” (“Pigs belong together.”) But I’m not going to run the picture of me with the bronze pig. Instead here I am with one of Christina’s sculptures.

I’m referring to Rudolf’s wife Christina von Bitter . She’s a wonderful artist—she makes sculptures of whimsical large constructions from wire, paper and paste, some pink, but mostly white.

[My mother, Marianne von Bitter, in 1936.]

Rudolf’s two children are very well-bred and pleasant. His 17-year-old daughter looks a little like my mother looks in a photo taken when she was about 20. There’s a certain shape of nose that my mother and I and Cousin Rudolf have, the von Bitter nose, and I see a little of that in Rudolf’s daughter. And there’s some similarity in their brows. How touching to come back to Germany and find an echo of Mom. It’s touching and a bit uncanny.

One of Rudolf’s neighbors puts a special New Year’s inscription in chalk on their door every year, I saw a few more of these around town. They have to do with Epiphany, the Feast of the Kings. The letters stand for Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar—the names of the kings.

[Hans Cranach the Elder, “The Mouth of Truth” (If you tell a lie, it bites your hand)]

Unlike me, cousin Rudolf has actually read the whole of The Phenomenology of the Mind by our common great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel. He advised me on a tactic for finally plowing through it. “Read it like a novel. Even better, follow the advice of the Hegel scholar Ernst Bloch, and read the Phenomenology in parallel with Goethe’s Faust.”

By the way, here’s a zoomable PDF of our shared family tree, which was made up by our common uncle, also a Rudolf von Bitter, who died young in WWII. You read it in reverse, that is, Uncle Rudolf is at the top, and his ancestors are futher down. My name is Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, you understand. So cousin Rudolf and I would be one step furthere above the top of our uncle’s family tree. You can find Hegel down there among the ancestors.

Rudolf and his wife Christina and their two children were about to drive to Italy for a family vacation—it’s an eight to ten hour drive. They like to listen to an audio books on CDs during these long drives to pass the time. Christina had considered getting Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, but instead had gotten an Agatha Christie novel (in German). And Rudolf exclaims, “No, I have gotten CDs of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess. It’s really very funny.”

Although I was in fact sympathetic to Rudolf’s proposal, at the same time it’s incongruity cracked me up, it was like something a Woody Allen character would do—“Uh, yeah, I like to play a tape of Kafka’s The Trial when I’m a long trip with my family.” Rudolf is truly my cousin.

I didn’t make it to the famous Hofbrau Haus this time, although I did swing by an outdoor offshoot of the Hofbrau near a Chinese Tower in the park. A brass band pumps oompah music from two stories up in the tower, and you can buy a soft pretzel the size of a baseball catcher’s face protector.

Munich is Beer City, and it took some effort on my part to maintain a sane frame of mind. I actually saw a group of ten guys pedaling a bar down the street, a man-powered trolley, complete with a giant wooden keg of beer, big steins on the bar-top, and rowdy singing.

I had one non-alcoholic Lowenbrau in a beer garden, just for old times’ sake, but that was enough. For the rest of the time, I stuck to a pleasant drink that Christina von Bitter steered me to: Apfelshorle, which is apple juice with sparkling water mixed in.

I had a pleasant flashback, walking into a museum of crystals run by the geology group at the local university. When we were living in Heidelberg from 1978-1980, there were some displays like that, and I’d look at them while working on an early draft of Infinity and the Mind, my nonfiction book about infinity, and at the same time writing White Light, my novel about a guy who climbs to higher of levels of infinity in the afterworld. Each endeavor was feeding the other. And those crystals came to seem like symbols to me, and I dreamed about them. Here’s a quote about this from my forthcoming memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker.

I got into a very pleasant and exalted mental state during this period of time. I remember having a magical dream in which I was scrambling up the ridge of a mountain. The stone underfoot was slippery pieces of shale, and among the stones I was finding wonderful polyhedral crystals the size of chestnuts or hedgehogs. Even within the dream, I knew that these treasures represented my wonderful new ideas.

I liked seeing German words written out everywhere, I might smile at odd German surnames I spot, such as “Pfnür,” which sounds a bit like my SF word, “fnoor”. It’s great hearing German spoken aloud. My Muttersprache, the mother tongue. Everything sounds somewhat funny to me in German. At one point I heard a woman complaining about an acquaintance. “Die blöde Kuh! Sie ruft mich ewig an.” (“The stupid cow. She’s always phoning me.”) Love it.

I’d almost forgotten that I can speak German, but the skill comes back quickly. It’s like remembering you can ride a bicycle. One thing I always need to remember is that I have to push the accent so hard that, from the inside, it feels like I’m straining and overdoing it. But if I don’t make that extra effort, nobody can understand me. Certainly the locals treat me better if I try. They think it’s cute to hear an American talk half-decent German. Like seeing a dog walk on his hind legs.

The working-class locals—the echt Bavarians—have a cozy way of rolling their R’s. But my cousin Rudolf and his family speak the standard, less-accented German, the so-called hoch Deutsch.

After Rudolf and his family left for their trip, I was my own for a few days, into my own head, which was fun, although at times a little lonely. I was definitely slowing down. Like a clock winding down. My legs were beyond tired after two weeks of vacationing. So I spend a lot of time sitting down in cafes.

In the mornings I lie on Rudolf’s couch for awhile. When I’m motionless, it feels so good that it’s hard to get up. Sitting with my legs crossed is an active sensual pleasure. I’m at a point where every day I want to walk a little less. So when I go out, I sometimes ride Rudolf’s bicycle.

But it’s good to get out. I saw five or six guys surfing on a standing wave where a piped surge of water flows out into a park meadow, an artificial stream called the Ice Canal. It’s next to a bridge, and a big crowd was watching. Each guy would manage a minute or two on the wobbly wave, then eat it and get swept downstream. Surf München!

I feel like I’m having an extra inning of vacation here, a bonus round. Listening to an ensemble of classical musicians on the street, complete with grand piano. I start thinking about my life, and again about the Nested Scrolls autobiography I wrote, and about how much better things have turned out for me than I’d ever hoped.

The sweet music fills my throat.

It was intensely nostalgic to return to Geneva. I first visited Sylvia at her parents’ apartment there in 1964, the summer after my freshman year at Swarthmore. And we were married at the American Episcopal Church in Geneva in June, 1967.

Sylvia’s father Arpad worked at a branch of the United Nations called WIPO, for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and eventually he became the Director-General. Up until 2005, Sylvia and I visited Geneva once or sometimes twice a year—call it forty trips for me. And we always brought the kids along. We were were in Geneva with our children as newborns, as toddlers, as teens, as twenty-year-olds—over and over, year after year.

Sometimes I’d split off from the family and spend a few hours wandering the downtown alone. The biggest sight is, of course, the famous fountain in the lake, the jet d’eau. I remember working on some of my novels in Geneva—for instance I got the idea for the floating “Umpteen Seas” of The Hollow Earth by imagining Lake Geneva lifting up to hang suspended in the air, a giant, jiggling glob.

This time around, Sylvia and I stayed, for the first time ever, in a Geneva hotel. We found a fairly inexpensive two-star hotel called La Bel’ Espérance, run by, of all people, the Salvation Army. Not that the hotel guests were street people, they were low-end business types and frugal tourists like ourselves. The nice thing about the hotel is that it’s on a quiet side-street in the heart of the cute medieval part of Geneva called the Vielle Ville, not far from a nice old cafe-lined plaza called the Bourg de Four.

One thing that kept striking me about Geneva was how many things have remained unchanged over the forty years I’ve been going there. Although it seems as if they’re continually doing construction on the city—a lot of this work involved retrofitting or strengthening or restoring or refurbishing the same stuff that’s always been there. It’s worth noting that there’s not much graffiti in Geneva. Although I’d gotten to enjoy the wall decorations in Lisbon, it was kind of relaxing to see the unblemished gray and beige walls of Genève.

It being April, the weather fluctuated between rain and sun. Lush chestnut trees line the old city wall around the Vielle Ville. After so many visits, I know the streets of Geneva very well—better, really, than I’d expected. At every turn, new memories came floating up.

Our daughter Isabel and her husband turned up in Geneva the same day as us, and we had a lot of fun walking around with them, showing them some of our favorite spots. We four had a nice lunch at a cafe that Sylvia and I have always loved, it’s in an 1890s pavilion in a park below the old city wall, the park also holds some buildings of the University of Geneva.

We got together with Sylvia’s brother, her nieces, and her step-mother. Lots of warm family visiting,

One particular evening Sylvia and I ate in a bistro with four of the young people. It was warm and cozy in there, a magical evening, one of those times that stands forever as a kind of oasis along one’s long journey through life. One of us had a horsemeat steak, which is a common thing over there. I had ice-cream flambé. Sylvia’s neice Diana told us that when Swiss kids are in bands they sometimes sing a fake English that they call Yogurt—I guess it’s a relative of the “French” that the waiters’ speak in the Café La Boeuf segments of Prairie Home Companion.

On the last day, we visited Sylvia’s step-mother. A sweet woman. She took us to see the the “Tulip Festival” in Morges. It wasn’t like a festival in sense of crowds or an admission fee.

It was bed after bed of incredibly gorgeous tulips in a green park at the edge of Lake Geneva, with towering mountains plunging into the lake on the other side.

Hardly anyone there. We wandered in, gorged on beauty, and left.

By the time we hit Geneva, Sylvia and I had entered a zone of exponentially increasing physical exhaustion. I was walking slower and slower, like a watch running down. There’s something exquisitely pleasurable about being so tired out. I’m very aware of my body, and I deeply savor each moment that I can sit down. The fatigue is like a cushion that I recline upon.

During my afternoon rests and my idle evening hours, I spend hours playing with my photos in my Lightroom program, tweaking my new memories in real time: clarity, contrast, vibrance, exposure, brightness, blacks.

Right next to our hotel I saw a window of high-priced amplifiers which, how retro, include non-digital vacuum tubes. Analog has always been where the truest gnarl is at.

Sylvia and I hit the Museum of Art and History, visiting my two favorite rooms there. In one room are the paintings of Felix Vallotton (1865-1925), a guy with an amazing sense of color. He does mythological kinds of scenes, only the characters are very much recognizable as turn-of-the-century individuals. The paintings are a little bit peculiar…unfortunately I didn’t get a shot of any of them.

In my other favorite room are works by the Geneva artist, Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918). He has several styles. In one style he paints amazing scenes of lakes and mountains, quite modern and impressionistic, with really wonderful hues. The paintings take on an abstract, symbolic energy. Hodler has one particular blue that I wish I knew how to mix. The guard told me to take photos, but I snuck one of his “Lac de Thoune” 1909.

I got photos of three of Hodler’s self-portraits as well. These are wonderfully expressive and remarkably differentiated from each other. He’s making a face in this one, like a guy in a photobooth. These works speak to me as an aging writer, as Hodler did them in 1916 and 1917, shortly before his death at age 65. What vigor, self-knowledge, irony!

The days of our long vacation roll on, each day with its own little tasks and hurdles. I can imagine being paralyzed with fear and worry—even now, after years of travel, I have tendencies in that direction. But in reality, it’s just one step at a time. Walk to the tram stop. Get the tram to the train station. Find the train track. Etc. And if you flub a step—like if you to see a sight and it’s closed because it’s, whatever, Tuesday afternoon, you can always do something else. If you miss a connection and spend an extra night, you can always find a room.

The Swiss public transport is like a clock. The trams, busses, and train cars are of an extravagantly high quality, they roll smoothly, they’re frequent and ubiquitous. One aspect of using public transport is that we spend a fair amount of time waiting in public places. I didn’t bring my smart phone on this trip. So how to use the time? Look around, duh.

If restless, I pull out the folded square of paper I usually carry in my back pocket and write down what I see, for later incorporation into my travel notes and blog posts. Or I take a photo of a pattern I see in the surroundings.

On the platform in Geneva, waiting for the train to Zurich and on to Munich, I noticed that the people in Europe are thinner than Americans on the whole. No adults wear baseball caps. Almost nobody shaves their head. Leather shoes are more the rule than sport shoes.

Good to see you again, Geneva. I’ll be back.