Dear readers,
I am delighted to report that my readership reached an all-time high of seventeen readers yesterday. In an effort to continue to increase my readership, I have decided to tell you my take on the meaning of life.
Many of you may not realize how close I was to death in November of 2011. Right before that time, at the end of October, I suffered through a severe relapse of depression, which had afflicted me for several years. I was doing a poor job of coping with it, unfortunately, and so I decided to kill myself. I was not totally satisfied with my decision, but I saw no better alternative at the time, and it seemed to me the most practical way of escaping from my problems.
Luckily, my family found out what I was going through and convinced me to seek immediate medical help. The course of my recovery from my illness was too long and complicated to describe here; what is most interesting, for the purposes of this blog, were its results.
One of the first things that I started enjoying once I began my recovery was simple sensory inputs. I liked breathing, looking up at the sky, and feeling the wind along my skin; I liked the sun and trees and the horizon. A simple and obvious lesson to take from this is that one should never stop wondering at the world. It is a miracle that any of us are alive at all, and if we summed up the number of literally awesome experiences that we had had in our lifetimes, or even the number of such experiences that we would accrue over a single day if we tried to see the world as though we had never seen it before (but had all the sensory mechanisms in place to experience it), we would find that the amount of positive feeling that a single day or life can generate was enormous. Life also generates a great many negative feelings, but if we can see them as single threads in a much larger tapestry, we may find it easier to weather our misfortunes.
While Buddhists claim, or so I have been told, that life is suffering, and that the way to achieve bliss is to accept life as such and escape into a purely spiritual world, I consider it much more sage to engage as fully in life, with one's senses and one's mind, as one possibly can. What I am struggling to express is that each of us is the narrator of a sort of epic: individual human lives turn out in a wide variety of bizarre and interesting ways, and each of our experiences forms part of the sum of human experience. The life of every cobbler, miller, and tailor has contributed in some way to this total, much as each of us would do if we added a sentence to the tale of human life. I do not know what to make of this in terms of our each leading our own lives, but the idea that we are all organically connected in this way is intriguing to me.
I should pass on to matters more immediately relevant to my travels, but I have two things to say first. Firstly, I do not know if this type of writing will actually increase my readership, as it may not be as interesting as a straight description of my travels; secondly, I have an anecdote to add to it. (Anecdote is often a better tool for telling people how to live than exposition is, hence the popularity of novels.) I recently had a nightmare - last night, I think - in which I was offered a job at the parking company for which I used to work and accepted the position. Not only did I fail to show up for the first few days, having forgotten that I even had a job, but I thought with horror at the amount of each day that my job would eat up. While I expect to have no difficulty quelling my urge to travel within the next few years, as I will naturally want to transition into a more settled phase in life, and think that having a full-time job should not, in theory, conflict with one's fully engaging with the surrounding world, it is evident that a part of my subconscious disagrees with this notion. Either that, or I do not especially want to work at a desk signing people up for medical benefits.
I do not remember how I started my day; I remember only that I arrived in Speyer at around 12:45. The train ride there was mostly dull, as the landscape south of Frankfurt is flat, but I passed through several fairly pretty towns, including Ludwigshafen, and one hopelessly-ugly one, Mannheim. The former literally means "Ludwig's Port/Harbor," while the latter might mean something about being ugly; Mannheim is mostly a transportation hub and center of industry, and it shows in the city's grey, featureless skyline. While I knew from last year that "burg" meant "castle", I only recently learned that "dorf" (as in "Dusseldorf") means "village" and that "berg" (e.g., Nuremberg) means "mountain." While some cities in Germany surely have names with no particular lexical meaning, it is interesting that many of them have names, the etymology of which is relatively easy to trace.
Speyer was visually attractive but offered none of the living history of cities like Vienna or Warsaw; in fact, many small, old cities like Speyer present one with something closer to dead history. Besides a small collection of very beautiful and historically-important buildings, many of a religious nature, Speyer contains absolutely nothing of note: it is a backwater with some very nice churches. When I read by the collection box for the cathedral that it costs 2,500 Euros a day to maintain it, I wondered if we were making a mistake in clinging so obstinately to Germany's history. Would it be better to let old buildings naturally degrade, like dead trees in a forest, making room for newer, more vital developments? I am all in favor of clinging to the old, as I am fond of it, but I wonder how much use it really brings us. (Is it not preserved in history books?)
My tour of Speyer ended very comfortably after an hour-and-a-half or two hours: I felt that I had seen as much as I wanted of the city and was ready to move on to Heidelberg. I took the same train route back as I had taken to get there and immediately set off on foot to the city center. Having been directed by an employee of a nearby hotel to my hostel, which is located on a road designed almost as stupidly as the one in Torun that turned back in on itself, I set out to explore the waterfront of the city and get dinner.
Heidelberg is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen. It trumps even Freiburg and Salzburg, my previous two favorites - it is incredible. Its charm lies in a combination of a great many characteristics: it lies next to a river; it is surrounded by hills; it is overlooked by a crumbling castle (which is currently being restored); it is full of winding streets, houses packed together like sardines, and old buildings; and it has an elongated city center. The pedestrian walkway through the city's historic town is, according to the owner of this hostel, a mile long, and yet it does not seem to big that one gets lost and fails to see everything in the town. The effect of the city center's layout is to make the city gradually unfold before one's eyes as one discovers a new gem every block or two, rather than being diluted by contemporary structures and construction sites or being so concentrated that one sees it all in two minutes. Heidelberg is a university town full of bikers and students; it has many more shops than the smaller cities of which I have sometimes written, showing that it is alive and growing; and it has a giant variety of cafes, restaurants, and bakeries. Its only real downside is its being so overridden by tourists that all of its storeowners speak English, making it feel a little less German than some of the places that I have visited.
My plans for the next few days are very well-laid. Tomorrow morning, I am going to walk through the part of Heidelberg that I have not yet seen and try to explore a few of its churches; at 9:48 AM, I am going to catch the train to Strasbourg, which will only cost 28.80 Euros there and back; at 7:41 PM, I will return from Strasbourg, having spent some 4.5 hours there, and check out a nearby restaurant; on the morning of June 12, I am going to walk around the castle and look out over the city; and I am going to check out one of the bakeries in town that I have picked out and leave for Stuttgart - hopefully, along the Neckar.
I am delighted to report that my readership reached an all-time high of seventeen readers yesterday. In an effort to continue to increase my readership, I have decided to tell you my take on the meaning of life.
Many of you may not realize how close I was to death in November of 2011. Right before that time, at the end of October, I suffered through a severe relapse of depression, which had afflicted me for several years. I was doing a poor job of coping with it, unfortunately, and so I decided to kill myself. I was not totally satisfied with my decision, but I saw no better alternative at the time, and it seemed to me the most practical way of escaping from my problems.
Luckily, my family found out what I was going through and convinced me to seek immediate medical help. The course of my recovery from my illness was too long and complicated to describe here; what is most interesting, for the purposes of this blog, were its results.
One of the first things that I started enjoying once I began my recovery was simple sensory inputs. I liked breathing, looking up at the sky, and feeling the wind along my skin; I liked the sun and trees and the horizon. A simple and obvious lesson to take from this is that one should never stop wondering at the world. It is a miracle that any of us are alive at all, and if we summed up the number of literally awesome experiences that we had had in our lifetimes, or even the number of such experiences that we would accrue over a single day if we tried to see the world as though we had never seen it before (but had all the sensory mechanisms in place to experience it), we would find that the amount of positive feeling that a single day or life can generate was enormous. Life also generates a great many negative feelings, but if we can see them as single threads in a much larger tapestry, we may find it easier to weather our misfortunes.
While Buddhists claim, or so I have been told, that life is suffering, and that the way to achieve bliss is to accept life as such and escape into a purely spiritual world, I consider it much more sage to engage as fully in life, with one's senses and one's mind, as one possibly can. What I am struggling to express is that each of us is the narrator of a sort of epic: individual human lives turn out in a wide variety of bizarre and interesting ways, and each of our experiences forms part of the sum of human experience. The life of every cobbler, miller, and tailor has contributed in some way to this total, much as each of us would do if we added a sentence to the tale of human life. I do not know what to make of this in terms of our each leading our own lives, but the idea that we are all organically connected in this way is intriguing to me.
I should pass on to matters more immediately relevant to my travels, but I have two things to say first. Firstly, I do not know if this type of writing will actually increase my readership, as it may not be as interesting as a straight description of my travels; secondly, I have an anecdote to add to it. (Anecdote is often a better tool for telling people how to live than exposition is, hence the popularity of novels.) I recently had a nightmare - last night, I think - in which I was offered a job at the parking company for which I used to work and accepted the position. Not only did I fail to show up for the first few days, having forgotten that I even had a job, but I thought with horror at the amount of each day that my job would eat up. While I expect to have no difficulty quelling my urge to travel within the next few years, as I will naturally want to transition into a more settled phase in life, and think that having a full-time job should not, in theory, conflict with one's fully engaging with the surrounding world, it is evident that a part of my subconscious disagrees with this notion. Either that, or I do not especially want to work at a desk signing people up for medical benefits.
I do not remember how I started my day; I remember only that I arrived in Speyer at around 12:45. The train ride there was mostly dull, as the landscape south of Frankfurt is flat, but I passed through several fairly pretty towns, including Ludwigshafen, and one hopelessly-ugly one, Mannheim. The former literally means "Ludwig's Port/Harbor," while the latter might mean something about being ugly; Mannheim is mostly a transportation hub and center of industry, and it shows in the city's grey, featureless skyline. While I knew from last year that "burg" meant "castle", I only recently learned that "dorf" (as in "Dusseldorf") means "village" and that "berg" (e.g., Nuremberg) means "mountain." While some cities in Germany surely have names with no particular lexical meaning, it is interesting that many of them have names, the etymology of which is relatively easy to trace.
Speyer was visually attractive but offered none of the living history of cities like Vienna or Warsaw; in fact, many small, old cities like Speyer present one with something closer to dead history. Besides a small collection of very beautiful and historically-important buildings, many of a religious nature, Speyer contains absolutely nothing of note: it is a backwater with some very nice churches. When I read by the collection box for the cathedral that it costs 2,500 Euros a day to maintain it, I wondered if we were making a mistake in clinging so obstinately to Germany's history. Would it be better to let old buildings naturally degrade, like dead trees in a forest, making room for newer, more vital developments? I am all in favor of clinging to the old, as I am fond of it, but I wonder how much use it really brings us. (Is it not preserved in history books?)
My tour of Speyer ended very comfortably after an hour-and-a-half or two hours: I felt that I had seen as much as I wanted of the city and was ready to move on to Heidelberg. I took the same train route back as I had taken to get there and immediately set off on foot to the city center. Having been directed by an employee of a nearby hotel to my hostel, which is located on a road designed almost as stupidly as the one in Torun that turned back in on itself, I set out to explore the waterfront of the city and get dinner.
Heidelberg is the most beautiful city that I have ever seen. It trumps even Freiburg and Salzburg, my previous two favorites - it is incredible. Its charm lies in a combination of a great many characteristics: it lies next to a river; it is surrounded by hills; it is overlooked by a crumbling castle (which is currently being restored); it is full of winding streets, houses packed together like sardines, and old buildings; and it has an elongated city center. The pedestrian walkway through the city's historic town is, according to the owner of this hostel, a mile long, and yet it does not seem to big that one gets lost and fails to see everything in the town. The effect of the city center's layout is to make the city gradually unfold before one's eyes as one discovers a new gem every block or two, rather than being diluted by contemporary structures and construction sites or being so concentrated that one sees it all in two minutes. Heidelberg is a university town full of bikers and students; it has many more shops than the smaller cities of which I have sometimes written, showing that it is alive and growing; and it has a giant variety of cafes, restaurants, and bakeries. Its only real downside is its being so overridden by tourists that all of its storeowners speak English, making it feel a little less German than some of the places that I have visited.
My plans for the next few days are very well-laid. Tomorrow morning, I am going to walk through the part of Heidelberg that I have not yet seen and try to explore a few of its churches; at 9:48 AM, I am going to catch the train to Strasbourg, which will only cost 28.80 Euros there and back; at 7:41 PM, I will return from Strasbourg, having spent some 4.5 hours there, and check out a nearby restaurant; on the morning of June 12, I am going to walk around the castle and look out over the city; and I am going to check out one of the bakeries in town that I have picked out and leave for Stuttgart - hopefully, along the Neckar.
I have failed to communicate a whole bunch of the things that I saw today. I forgot to mention that the cathedral in Speyer was as impressive as the ones in Cologne and Worms, but in a different way: it had several rooms, a huge number of statues (like the one in Frankfurt, if my memory holds), and a series of massive arches that made one feel as though one were looking through a tunnel when one entered the front door. One of the churches in town, too, had even better stained-glass windows than the cathedral at Cologne. While I am fond of Impressionistic painting, I think that stained-glass windows that lack detail are as good as nothing, as their whole purpose, as far as I can tell (beyond looking pretty, which they do just fine when they are detailed), is to tell people stories from the Bible, and they cannot very well do that if people do not even know what they represent. I will have to end my post now, as I need to get to bed (and should probably shave and shower), but I hope that it was interesting! Perhaps a further increase in my readership would induce me to turn into a genius and start writing posts that change people's lives. Only time will tell.
This is a pretty serious pilgrim.
Look! A castle!
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