Cadaques (birthpace of Dalí)

Rick, Heli Hernandez, and Giulio Massano, West Island

Frank Sousa

Sank heaven for liddle girls--Nurit, Diane, Betty, Mary, Blanca

Dario and Ian Borim

Priscila Moritz

With Matthew, Sophia, and Rachel Sousa

Blanca and Tziporah, New York Marathon

Havana

Jim and I, Dublin

Darwin's House, Down, Kent

Fez, Hotel Palais Jamais

                                                           Fez

   We started from Valencia fairly early and took an 8 hour bus trip to Almeria. The trip was uneventful, except for the drunken singing of a Moroccan in the back.

   Almeria is a pleasant Andalusian city, with broad avenues leading down to the port.

   The next day we took the ferry (5 hours) to Melilla. It was a peaceful trip, since there were very few other passengers.

   Melilla is an old city, still a part of Spanish soil. It is dominated by the Old City, near the port. The place is faded, but is quite pleasant. The main drawback is that it’s outrageously expensive. We got a very shabby hotel for 10,000 pesetas.

   We woke up early and had breakfast at the Nuevo California. Then we took a taxi to the border at Beni Enzar, 10 minutes away. We walked right through Spanish control without anybody making a peep, and entered the Moroccan side and a completely different, chaotic world. We waited in line with throngs of Moroccans at passport control. There was one guy working a computer, while another was sitting beside a huge antique filing case, the drawers marked with labels like “Foreigners, A-C.” We finally got stamped and passed through the Moroccan post.

   The first guy I asked about a taxi to Nador wanted 300 dirhams, about 20 times the worth of the ride. We took a local bus for 2 dirhams.

   In Nador, we were lucky enough to get to the station just as a bus was leaving for Fez. The ride was pleasant, though hot. The fun part was passing through the customs roadblocks; there were four of them during the trip. The drill was always the same. A Moroccan policeman gets on the bus, walks down the aisle searching for contraband. All the Moroccans on the bus—we were the only Europeans—were smuggling in something. The policeman would find a package, sometimes hidden under the seats, take its owner outside, and administer the appropriate response. We saw one customs official breaking bottles of contraband whisky against a nearby stone, while their owners looked on sadly.

   We arrived in Fez at the imposing Bab Bou Jeloud, the main gate into the old city (Fez el Bali). From there we got a local bus to Bab Guissa.

   The Hotel Palais Jamai is one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever been in. It was the home, in the 19th century, of a very powerful pal of the Sultan. The whole place is covered with exquisite tile work. It is set in an Andalusian garden, with tinkling fountains, trilling birds. Our room looked out over the Medina, and was an incredible sight. The balcony also looked out of the swimming pool and garden below. The whole effect is one of deep peace, broken only occasionally by the wailing of the muezzin from the tower of the Kerouine Mosque, the largest mosque in North Africa.

   We plunged right into the medina, just outside the hotel through Bab Guissa. It is a genuinely medieval world, with a labyrinth of small streets, lanes, alleys, and cul-de-sacs. I pride myself on my sense of direction, but was lost in about two minutes. The best trick is simply to walk either consistently uphill or downhill, and you’ll usually eventually come to a larger street. The streets are so narrow, and many of them are covered, so landmarks a hard to make out. I made a sort of game of making a mental map, which I gradually reproduced on paper, of the innards of the medieval anthill that is Fez.

   For three wonderful days we explored the medina. The highlights were the tanneries, the little workshops and souks, the pitiful donkeys loading almost to the breaking point. When they pass, you must often press yourself against the walls to avoid getting crushed. The driver yells “Belek, belek!” By the time we left, I could get in and out of the labyrinth without much difficulty.

   We went by train to Tangiers, where we spent the night. The next day we took the ferry to Gibraltar. After exploring this quaint bastion of Britannia, we walked over La Linea through an unguarded gate, and into Spain. A bus from Algeciras took us back to Valencia. It was a fine excursion.

Tangiers

With Mike Prentice, Paris

Varadero Beach, Cuba

Coliseum, Rome

Prague

With Friedel Susskind, Lichtenstein, 1999

With Barbara and Manfred Weber, Burg Eltz, 1999

"Zarathustrastein," Sils Maria, Switzerland

                         

                              Sils Maria (Switzerland): Nietzsche's "Zarathustrastein"

   Over the years, I’ve tried to retrace important steps in Nietzsche’s life. He’s been my philosophical hero, and I’ve eaten up the details of his very unusual life. We headed to Switzerland after attending the wedding of the daughter of Manfred and Barbara, our close German friends.

   My present topic is a small village in the Swiss mountains, and its connection to the so-called “doctrine of the eternal recurrence [die ewige wiederkehr des gleichen],” one of the most intriguing ideas of the 19th-century German philosopher F.W. Nietzsche (1844-1900).

   Sils Maria is nestled in a long valley, in the Upper Engadin region of Switzerland. At the one end of the valley is St. Moritz, while at the other is the Maloja Pass leading to the Ticino and on to Italy. The emerald Lakes Silvaplana and Sils lie in the middle. The picturesque Chaste Pinninsula juts out into Lake Sils. The valley is surrounded by snow capped peaks, the highest being Mt. Corvatsch. It is about as prototypically Swiss as one can imagine. In the summer morning, there is a snap in the air, and there is always snow upon the mountain peaks.

   On the northern side of the Lake Silvaplana, there is a large rock. And it was in just this spot that Nietzsche claims to have had a momentous philosophical epiphany. He describes it in Ecce Homo (Z.1), his somewhat zany “autobiography,” whose subsections are “Why I am so Wise,” “Why I am so clever,” etc.

"Now I shall relate the history of ZARATHUSTRA. The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, '6000 feet beyond man and time.' That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me."

   Born to Ludwig and Franziska Nietzsche in 1844, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche early distinguished himself as an unusually preconscious child: introspective, morose, and musically talented. After going through prep school at the prestigious Schulpforta (until 1863), he went on to the Universities of Bonn (for 1 year) and Leipzig, where he proceeded to exchange the study of theology—he was expected to follow in his pastor father’s footsteps—for philology. So brilliant was his career at Leipzig, that his teacher, Friedrich Ritschel, successfully proposed him as a candidate for the chair of philosophy at the Unvisersity of Basle in Switzerland. Thus, at 24 years old, Nietzsche was a professor.

   Nietzsche stayed 10 years at Basle. During this period he discovered the philosopher Schopenhauer and the mercurial Richard Wagner, with whom he was to have a tempestuous relationship. He composed a number of remarkable books, starting with The Birth of Tragedy and culminating with the aphoristic books Human All Too Human, The Gay Science.

    Nietzsche’s health, even as a boy, had never been good. And after many periods of intense suffering from headaches, fits of vomiting, and general exhaustion, Nietzsche resigned his teaching post and began a decade of drifting throughout Switzerland and Italy. N. was a “health nut,” and he was convinced that his living conditions—sun, light, metrological conditions, etc.—were of the highest importance. It is for this reason that Nietzsche was to spend the last ten years of his sane life wandering about from place to place, looking for relief and conditions under which he could bring to light the world shaking philosophical ideas that he felt were within him and which it was his destiny to bequeath to humanity.

   In 1889, he collapsed on a street in Turin. He was to spend the last ten years of his life as a pathetic invalid, cared for, first, my his mother, and then, after her death, by his diabolical sister Elizabeth. He died in 1900. Probably the cause was syphilis.

   In 1881, Nietzsche spent his first summer in Sils, in the house of one Gian Durisch. His writes to his sister Elizabeth, July 7, 1881 (B 6, 98-9):

“Of all the places on Earth, I feel best here in the Engadine. To be sure, the attacks come to me here as they do everywhere else; yet they are milder by far, much more humane. I am continuously calmed here, none of the pressure that I feel everywhere else. Here all excessive stimulation ceases for me. I would beg of mankind, ‘Preserve for me but three or four months of summer in the Engadine, otherwise really I cannot bear life any longer’ . . . Yet the Engadine summer is so short, and by September’s end I will return to Genoa. I have never had such tranquility, and the paths, woods, lakes, and meadows are as though made for me; the prices are not altogether beyond my means . . . The place is called Sils-Maria. Please keep the name a secret from my friends; I don’t want any visitors” (Krell, p.128).

   We had a very pleasant visit to the "Nietzsche Haus," which belonged to one Gian Durisch, who was Nietzsche's landlord during the summers he visited Sils. The house, which used to serve also as a grocery store) is now called the Nietzsche Haus, and is a museum dedidcated to the philosopher.

   It was here, in Sils Maria, at a mounmental rock, that Nietzsche claims—probably mistakenly—to have come upon the idea of the “eternal recurrence” : the the claim that everything has occured, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Nietzsche wants us to live in such a way as to be able to accept such an idea with equanimity.