Stonehenge

All my closing thoughts seem inadequate or overly sentimental – I remember flying home, arriving at the Victoria International airport, seeing my parents, driving back along the highway and entering the house I had called home for so long. I foresaw the unfolding of all the events in my imagination with a certainty uncharacteristic of life. There were minor variations, of course: hedges trimmed, new music on the radio, new pictures hanging on the walls, etc. They were all indicative of time passing but time that I didn’t see. Along with the ever-changing flow of life was a new faith in the genuineness of its transformation. There is a new vibrancy and clarity that accompany each relationship in my life. My time is no longer dragged down by the boredom that lingered before I left. The bustle of walking on different soils has eroded away the veil of presumptuous complacency and re-invigorated my dulling senses.

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Globe Theatre

Traversing the channel by Eurostar provide the limited excitement of twenty minutes of darkness. The slow ride through rural south London on a bright morning was enough of a pleasure to outweigh the annoyance of an overly talkative school group that shared the adjacent seats. I remember seeing advertisements in London later on that displayed train tracks leading right to the feet of famous Parisian or ‘Brusselsian’ monuments with the tag line: ‘Direct to the heart of Paris’ or ‘Brussels’ depending on the monument of course.

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Rosa’s Bataille Heroique

What do you hang next to the Mona Lisa? Because of renovations to its regular salon, today Leonardo’s painting is displayed next to Salvator Rosa’s ‘Passage’ and ‘Bataille Heroique’. Who is Salvator Rosa, anyway? I felt flippantly sorry for these paintings: having to endure either an endless neglect or a glance begot only by the oblivious queuing lines and the art history student with an obscure thesis topic. After spending only slightly longer than the appropriate time gazing at the smirking lady and her smooth cracking hands, I stood to one side to watch everyone photograph the Mona Lisa. In some ways, this was more exciting than the painting itself: Mona effortlessly commands a flurry of faithful international fans. She is a tourist monument of immeasurable proportions housed in a slightly smaller than expected frame. But other than the latter fact, what real incentive is there to take her picture? Have you not seen her enough times already? Do you really require one more out-of-focus and poorly lit picture with your thumbprint? Perhaps your friends won’t believe that you have seen her and need some documentary proof? I wonder if Mona ever tires of the endless attention and glances begot only by the oblivious queuing lines and the foreign visitor with an obscure tendency to personify paintings.

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