Faith of our fathers

One of the things we noticed on our tour of southern Europe -- not that it was any kind of surprise -- was the omnipresence of churches.

They often are built on hills, and overlook the landscape; many are beautiful, and a few -- like the Duomo in Florence -- are architectural wonders.

It's an interesting experience for a non-religious person like myself to walk into some of these buildings.  One of the first places we visited was the fifteenth-century Basilica de Santa Maria degli Angeli et dei Martiri in Rome, which is unprepossessing from the outside, but the inside is nothing short of stunning.

The churches of Europe are renowned for housing works of art, and one in the Basilica that struck me as beautiful (if somber) is The Head of St. John the Baptist by the modern Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj:

On the façade of the same church was another haunting sculpture:

This sort of painstaking artistry was evident in churches wherever we went.  There was the Church of St. Spiridion on the isle of Corfu:

And the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence:

But nowhere blew me away quite as much as the Church of La Sagrada Familia (the Holy Family) in Barcelona.  It was begun in 1882 by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí, who is a fine example illustrating the quote from Aristotle, "There never was a genius without a tincture of madness."  Gaudí knew it was such an extravagant plan that he'd never live to see it completed; in fact, it's still under construction today, and the locals call it "The church that will never be finished."  Like many of Gaudí's creations, from a distance the exterior looks like something out of Dr. Seuss:

Only when you get closer to you begin to see the intricate details of the sculptures in every recess:

All of this is suitably amazing... but then you step inside, and it takes your breath away.

Gaudí was a master of using light as part of his vision for the place, and the stained glass of La Sagrada Familia is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

According to the guide, Gaudí was intent not only on creating a monument to his religion, but creating a place that celebrated the natural world -- somewhere that all people, of every religion (or no religion at all) could wonder at and be uplifted by.

But still, I couldn't help remembering that places like this are built because of beliefs I don't share any longer.  In a very real way, I feel like an outsider when I enter these sacred spaces.  When I was a kid, growing up in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, every Sunday we sang the hymn "Faith of Our Fathers:"

Faith of our fathers, living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and sword,
O how our hearts beat high with joy, whene'er we hear that glorious word!
Faith of our fathers, living still, we will be true to thee till death.

As a child I sang those words with tremendous gusto, but it didn't really work out that way, did it?  I left the church at age 21 and after a period of searching, I kind of gave it all up and for the most part, never looked back.

But there's a part of me that still resonates to the desire embodied in places like La Sagrada Familia.  I don't think I'll ever go back to the beliefs I tried like mad to hold onto in my youth, but there's a mystery and grandeur in these buildings that plucks my heart like a guitar string.  It goes beyond just desiring the sense of community you find in a church; there's a part of me, perhaps, that craves ritual as a sign of belonging, that needs beautiful symbols to help explain this strange and often chaotic universe.

There's no doubt that religion has much to answer for.  Not just big ticket items like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Islamic jihadist movement(s), but suppression of dissent, institutionalized bigotry, misogyny, cruelty, homophobia, abuse of power, and simple self-righteousness.

But religion has also been the impetus for the creation of great beauty.  It's doubtful Gaudí would have envisioned a masterwork like La Sagrada Familia had he not been religious, and the same can be said of works like Michelangelo's Pietà and Bach's Mass in B Minor, to name only two of hundreds.  It's obvious I'm of divided mind on this topic, and it's beyond me to figure out how to square that circle and resolve the seeming paradox.  I rejected religion's fundamental claims forty years ago, yet its draw for me has never really gone away.

A long-ago friend once said about me that I was a failed mystic -- if I'd had the balls, I'd have been a monk.  The comment stuck with me all these years because it hits so close to the mark.  To paraphrase the poster on Fox Mulder's wall, I Wish I Could Believe.

But until that unlikely event occurs, I can still appreciate the profundity and depth of what the religious impulse has created.  And nowhere has that been realized more beautifully than in Gaudí's Church That Will Never Be Finished, in the city of Barcelona.

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Southern European retrospective

Greetings, loyal readers, I'm back a couple of days earlier than anticipated from a two-and-a-half week's trip to Europe, still a bit jet-lagged but otherwise unscathed.  We visited Italy, Croatia, Greece, France, and Spain, so only got a touch of each place (Italy is the place we got to explore the most thoroughly), but it was still, overall, a wonderful trip.

Flying, not so much.  Unlike certain other trips I can recall, it was mishap-free -- no missed connections or lost luggage, and not so much as a delay -- but flying in general has become a fairly miserable experience.  Witness our flight from Paris back to New York, wherein a passenger in the seat in front of my wife reclined her seat so far that Carol had about six cubic centimeters of space left in front of her.  She couldn't even bend over to get anything from underneath the seat.  It was tempting for her to recline her own seat, but she resisted, not only out of consideration and compassion for the passenger behind her, but for fear of triggering the dreaded Reclining Seat Chain Reaction, which continues like a row of human dominoes until you get to the row in the very back where the seats don't recline, and the last person ends up getting compressed into a vaguely human-shaped splat mark against the rear bulkhead.

But, honestly, these are clearly First World Problems, and we were privileged to get to travel and see some amazing places.  Here are a few high points, and some photos I took of cool spots, in the order we visited them.

First off, Rome.  Oh, my goodness, Rome.  The sense of antiquity there is palpable, almost everywhere you go.  So is the sense that you're taking your life into your own hands when you step into the street.  Roman drivers are flat-out insane.  They use their horns to communicate three things: (1) buongiorno!; (2) get out of the damn way, you idiot tourist; and (3) my car has a horn.  Lane markings are considered merely suggestions.  If you're on a motorcycle, lane markings are considered imaginary.  But we escaped without being run down, and got to see places like Palatine Hill:

Palatine Hill is where Augustus and Livia had their home.  Yes, that Augustus and Livia.  The foundation of their house still exists, in fact, which I find astonishing given that Augustus died in the year 14 C.E.  Then there's the Forum:

And the abso-freakin-lutely huge second-century temple of the emperor Antoninus Pius:

And the Fontana degli Dioscuri:

The last-mentioned is one of many giant statues we saw featuring extremely attractive naked people, which was a popular subject of sculpture back in ancient Rome and a tradition I definitely think we should bring back.

From Rome, our next stop was the lovely city of Dubrovnik, Croatia.  Here I parted ways with the rest of our group (Carol and I were traveling with four friends) and went on a boat ride through a wetland nature preserve north of the city.  The coastline of Croatia is stunningly beautiful -- one of the prettiest places I saw on the entire trip.

After Croatia, we had a day on the lovely island of Corfu.  Coastal Greece has the clearest water I've ever seen -- unfortunately, it was still a little cool to go for a swim.  The following photo is unretouched -- no filters, nothing.  That's actually the color of the water.

We got to do some tasting of local food and drink -- something that became a bit of a theme on the trip -- and were treated to Greek limoncello (much better than the Italian variety, we were told by the proprietor), various olives and olive oils (with freshly-baked bread), honeys, jams, and marmalades.

After Corfu we were supposed to go to Malta, long a fascination of mine for its role in the Crusades, but the weather turned very windy and the ship was unable to dock.  So, unfortunately, we had a day at sea instead -- Malta will have to wait for another time, I suppose.

The next stop was the island of Sicily, where we got to take a cooking class in the town of Taormina.  Here's a picture from near the restaurant.  That's Mount Etna in the background.

We learned how to make traditional hand-made pasta and pizza and then got to lunch on the results -- accompanied, of course, with large quantities of amazingly good wine.

At the end of the meal, we had a digestif of limoncello, which the proprietors assured us was much better than the Greek variety.

At this point we were in volcano-and-earthquake territory, which long-time readers of Skeptophilia will know is a major fascination of mine.  The 1908 earthquake in Messina, our guide told us, killed eighty thousand people and flattened nearly the entire city; most of the casualties, she said, died within a span of thirty-seven seconds as the ground lurched and buildings collapsed.  The Messina-Taormina fault, which lies just offshore of the east coast of the island, is still very much active, and as you saw, Mount Etna looms over the town of Taormina.  As we were sailing away that evening, we got a light show from the pretty well constantly-erupting island of Stromboli, which has been nicknamed "The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean."

Speaking of volcanoes, we next went to Naples, which sits in the shadow of Vesuvius -- in fact, a magmatic system underlies the entire region, leading to its nickname of the "Campi Flegrei" ("burning fields") about which I've written before.  We visited the ruins of Pompeii, which was an overwhelming enough experience that I'm planning an entire post devoted just to that, so you'll have to wait for photos and commentary.  But here's a photo of the city of Naples taken from the slopes of Vesuvius, just to give you an idea of how many people live in the bullseye.

After Naples we docked in the rather unattractive industrial port town of Livorno, and took a bus into Florence.  Florence, as you undoubtedly know, is famous for its art and architecture, including the Duomo -- the city cathedral -- which is truly incredible.

We also got to see David -- not the David, but a replica that is out in the square near the Accademia Gallery, home of the original.  Even the replica was suitably amazing.

As an amateur sculptor, I was gobsmacked by the beauty of the human figure, and the incredible detail Michelangelo was able to work into the musculature.  That man was a true genius.

It rained just about the entire time we were in Florence, so we went to the Galileo Museum, which is very much worth a visit if you're a science nerd.  The museum has a fine collection of early scientific devices, including this amazing armillary sphere that stands about eight feet tall:

And a hand-cranked glass lathe used for making lenses for telescopes and microscopes:

After Florence, we had a quick stop in coastal France.  This was the place I most felt shortchanged about, time-wise; we only had time to take a quick run in from our port (Cannes) to the charming little village of St. Paul de Vence.  It was still raining, but it's a lovely place, and one I wish I'd been able to spend more time exploring.  I also would have loved to go farther north; my father's family comes from only about two hundred kilometers north of there, up in the high Alps.  Once again -- like Malta -- that'll have to wait for another trip.

After Cannes, we went to the island of Ibiza.  Ibiza is one of two islands in the Balearic Archipelago, east of Spain, that we got to visit.  When a friend found out we were going to Ibiza, he said he'd been there, and that it was famous for sun, swimming, sex, and alcohol, and because of the last-mentioned he didn't remember much about the other three.  But true to form, we did something extremely nerdy instead and went to visit an organic farm, where we got to make our own herbal liqueur (which, amazingly enough, we were able to successfully transport home without the bottles breaking).

I didn't get any good photos of the farm, but here's an evening shot of the Ibiza lighthouse:

After Ibiza we went to another island in the Balearics, Mallorca, and while there we took a taxi up to Bellver Castle (which overlooks the city of Palma) and hiked our way back down, stopping along the way for some truly amazing cappuccino.

We finished up the trip in the city of Barcelona, where we got to visit the Sagrada Familia (again, which will be the subject of another post), and the wild, Dr.-Seussian Park Güell, conceived by the astonishingly creative mind of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí:

From there, it was a quick flight to Paris, a long flight to New York City, a quick flight to Rochester, and a drive back home, where we got in at two AM.  Then had to get up at seven to go pick up the dogs from the kennel.  So I think I'll be fighting the dregs of jet lag for a couple more days.

It was a whirlwind tour but an opportunity to visit some amazing places, have some awesome food and wine (and limoncello, about which I will not be pinned down to rank by any Greek or Italian partisans in the audience).  But it's nice to be home as well, where spring has finally set in and the garden is ready to plant.

So goodbye for now, southern Europe.  With luck, I'll be back someday.

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Icelandic travelogue

Over the last ten days I took a hiking and camping trip in Iceland.  It's a fascinating country, and earns well its nickname of "The Land of Fire and Ice."

It's my second visit; the first time I went there was in 2000, when I had only dated my (then) girlfriend, (now) wife, for a few months.  I'd signed up to go that August with a group of friends for a trip mostly focused on birdwatching, and one day over dinner a few months prior I said to Carol, half jokingly, "Hey, I'm taking a trip to Iceland, you wanna come?"  My expectation was that her response to being asked to go on a trip to a remote island in the North Atlantic by a guy she hadn't known long was going to be, "Um, no thanks... you have fun.  Why the hell do you want to go to Iceland, of all places?"

What she said was, "When do we leave?"

That was one of many moments that convinced me this was a match made in heaven.

The trip took us along the Ring Road around the entire perimeter of the island, and we saw some great birds and generally had a wonderful time.  This time, I went with a group of men associated with Mannsvolk, a German-based men's mentorship and workshop group that I first became associated with through a weekend retreat I attended in 2019.  So two weeks ago I packed everything into a new trekking backpack (my old one having seen its best days about thirty years ago), and off I went to Reykjavik.

I had been lulled into a false sense of security by my first trip, during which the weather was amazingly sunny and warm.  The locals we spoke to said that such a stretch of beautiful weather was pretty well unheard-of, even in midsummer, but of course it was the weather itself and not their warnings about how bad it could be that stuck in my memory.  This time, though, was more typical, and we only had a couple of days of sunshine and anything like real warmth.

Me at Landmannalaugar, on the nicest day we had.  Of course I took the opportunity to run around shirtless, because that's kind of what I do.

Most of the weather was cloudy, cold, and intermittently spitting rain.  The wind varied from "breezy" to "stiff gale" to "holy fuck grab on to something heavy or you'll blow away."  But there's no doubt the scenery was well worth the discomfort.  You may have heard about the recent volcanic eruption of Fagradalsfjall, one of the dozens of active volcanoes in Iceland -- specifically the cinder cone eruption at Meradalir.  Well, we hiked in and saw it.  It's one of the most grueling hikes I've ever done, over loose, basketball-sized chunks of lava rock, but when we got there... wow.

You hear it before you see it; a low, powerful thrumming noise, like a giant heartbeat.  It makes your innards vibrate.  Then you can see the steam plumes over a low rise, and smell the sulfur.  Then you get to the top of a the hill, and...

It was jetting fountains of lava into the air, and the whole surface was undulating like a pot of oatmeal bubbling on the stove.  It's almost a cliché to say that sights like this make you realize the power of nature, but man, after being here, I felt very puny.

We also went near Hekla, one of the most active volcanoes in the world (although not erupting at the moment).  During various enormous outbursts over the last three thousand years, Hekla spewed out so much tephra (fragmented chunks of lava that look like coarse black sand) that it created a terrain that looks like a moonscape, where almost nothing grows but tufts of desiccated grass.

The Ash Desert of Hekla

Still, as Ian Malcolm famously put it, "Life... uh... finds a way."  Even in areas that had been hit hard by volcanism, we saw signs of the tenacity of living things.

Iceland owes its violent geology to the fact that it sits at the boundary of the North American and Eurasian Tectonic Plates, which are moving apart at a rate of about 9.7 centimeters a year.  This fairly extraordinary rate of stretch means that Iceland is getting larger, and as the island splits in two, subterranean magma comes to the surface to fill in the gap.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the USGS]

Interestingly, our path took us pretty much right along the plate margin (the purple line in the above map) the whole way, starting in Reykjavik in the southwest (Fagradalsfjall Volcano is the red triangle at the lower left), going up the left-hand branch of the forking split almost all the way to Krafla in the northeast.  One nice thing is that we didn't go to many of the same places I'd already seen on my first trip, but one unfortunate exception was Mývatn.

Mývatn is one of those places that fall into the "it makes a good story afterward" category.  We'd selected it as a destination on our first trip because it has a well-deserved reputation for being an outstanding site for birdwatching.  We only found out after we got there, though, that there's a reason for its popularity with birds.  It's also wildly popular with flying insects, particularly a species of midge which enjoys nothing more than flying into noses, ears, and mouths.  "Mývatn," in fact, is Icelandic for "lake of the flies," something we didn't find out until after we'd gotten there.  People in the nearby village of Reykjahlíð, in fact, wear head nets when they walk to the grocery store.  I distinctly recall talking to a local when I was there the first time, and he found out we'd come for birdwatching.  "It's the only reason you'd be here," he said, glumly.  "This is the worst place in Iceland."

Be that as it may, we stayed there a couple of days this time.  I'm happy to say that there was only one evening when the insects were truly gawdawful, but given that the reason for that was at other times the wind was howling so hard the flies couldn't find us, I'm not sure that's much of a consolation.

The various difficulties we experienced on this trip were worth it, though, to see places like Aldeyjarfoss Waterfall, with its bizarre columnar basalt formations:

And the harbor of the beautiful little village of Akureyri:

And I even got to see some birds, albeit familiar ones:

So all in all, it was a pretty cool trip.  I'm glad to be back in a place where I don't have to expend inordinate amounts of energy to (1) stay warm, and (2) avoid being blown into the next time zone, but like with most travel, the bad bits are already fading in my memory, to be replaced by the amazement of seeing volcanoes and glaciers and waterfalls, the likes of which exist nowhere else on Earth.

And I'd call that a fair exchange.

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Down the hole

By now, everyone has certainly heard that Donald Trump allegedly referred to a variety of Third-World countries, and the entire continent of Africa, as "shithole countries."

I append the word "allegedly" to this statement not because there's any particular doubt that this is how he looks at the world.  I'm just trying to be as even-handed as possible, given that Senators Dick Durbin and Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said yes, Trump said that, while Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia said no, he didn't.  Trump, of course, denies it categorically, but given that Trump could say something on-air in front of millions of viewers, and five minutes later state with a straight face that he never said it, and his diehard supporters would believe him both times, I'm not inclined to put him either in the "yes" or "no" column.

What I want to address here, though, is a response that I saw posted on social media shortly after the whole incident hit the media.  The initial post I saw showed photographs of slums in Nigeria and Haiti -- two of the particular "shitholes" Trump referred to -- with a text basically saying, "See, he was right."

Of course, the problem here is that if you're selective, you can do that with anywhere.  For example [all images in this post courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons with the exception of the last two, which were taken by me], take a look at the following:

Figure 1: The United States of America 

Or this one:

Figure 2: Also The United States of America 

Or this one:

Figure 3: Yup, This Is The United States Too

And before you get your dander up, I'm not using these to prove that the USA is a horrible place, only that if you cherry pick your data points, you can prove damn near anything.  (If you're curious, the first photo is from Detroit, the second from Camden, New Jersey, and the third from Rand, West Virginia.)

What really torqued me about the social media post, however, was one of the responses to it.  "Far as I've seen, it hasn't been proven that [Trump] actually said that," the comment went.  "But if he did, he's right."

It blows me away how quick people are to use some idiotic internet meme as incontrovertible support of what they already believed.  It's like taking confirmation bias and raising it to an art form.

But really, think about what that person is saying.  That the continent of Africa -- which is the size of the continental United States, China, India, and Europe combined -- can be lumped together under one derogatory epithet and summarily dismissed.  A continent that contains places like this:

Pretoria, South Africa

And this:

Point Lenana, Mount Kenya, Kenya

And this:

The Cape of Good Hope

And this:

Waterfalls in Angola

And has faces like this:

Woman from Gambia

Yes, I know there's terrible poverty and corruption in Africa.  The thing is, there's terrible poverty and corruption everywhere.  By looking at the United States as some kind of pinnacle -- and by claiming that what Trump and his cronies are doing is "making America great again" (merciful heavens, I am sick unto death of that phrase) -- you are ignoring both the beauty in other parts of the world and the problems we have right here in our own back yard.

So for cryin' in the sink, before you throw your opinion in with a guy who is an unashamed racist (yes, I said the word), try breaking out of your own comfortable little bubble of smug certainty and travel to some of these countries that Trump and his supporters have dismissed with a single word.  You see, I have.  I've been in places like Belize and Ecuador and Trinidad and Malaysia.  Yes, I saw poverty, and I saw some people in terrible living conditions.  But I also saw this:

Pacha Quindi, Ecuador

And this:

Fraser's Hill, Malaysia

So my advice: stop falling for comforting overgeneralizations.  Get up off your ass and travel to some of the "shithole countries," talk to the people who live there, and realize that the rest of the world is just as varied -- both in good and bad ways -- as the United States.  Listen to Mark Twain, who said, "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.  Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

After that come back and we'll talk.