The Road Taken

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

When I, somewhere ages and ages hence, am telling this, perhaps I will depart from Robert Frost and say, with a sigh, that although I took the road less traveled by, it made no difference at all. This will, of course, be only partially true—an echo of petulance long since forgotten, a response to tenderness not quite forgotten.

Or, more likely, I will not refer to Frost at all. I will say with a giggle that I liked moving so much that I transplanted myself across the Atlantic not once but twice, and this I did in one fateful month, many years ago...

But today I say things with a sigh, because it is fall in Chicago, and yellow-leaved, damp fall in Chicago invites sentimentality, and wallowing, and a little Robert Frost. And it invites musing—on journeys taken that finished unexpectedly; on places seen that were beautiful; on almost-homes in other-lives that ended abruptly; on cities, begrudgingly loved, that welcomed me back without grudges.

One of the first things I did in Cambridge was to buy a bicycle. 35 pounds or so got me a slightly battered Raleigh bike, purple with a tattered wicker basket. 5 pounds at the local Tesco got me a set of lights, and a little bell whose faint ding!—more an ‘um, excuse me’ than a ‘get out of my way’—betrayed its owner’s thrift. Undeterred by the twigs that had flown off the mouldering basket as I pedalled happily from Madingley Road to the center of town (an unwitting Hansel-and-Gretel trail of damp wood, pointing my way back home), I loaded it up with frozen Indian appetizers and Grown-in-the-UK (complete with a picture of the farmer) apples and lettuce from the local Sainsbury’s.

And cheese. The cheese was just so cheap. Aged cheddar, crumbly and tangy, the kind I saved up for and bought as a treat in Chicago, was cheaper than the crackers I didn’t buy to go with it.

As I biked through town, I wondered that such a place existed. The colleges, centuries old, no two alike, basked in their exclusivity. I could catch glimpses of dusty libraries through lit windows, of immaculate lawns on which no mere mortal (save for those awarded the coveted status of ‘Fellow’) might tread. Tradition, tradition, tradition—keeping things beautiful, keeping things elusive.

Even clogged with punts, the River Cam is beautiful. The colleges line it, privileged and gracious.

The architecture is human-scale. And a second look is richly rewarded with interesting details. I was partial to the heads, like this one...

and this pair...

and the wooly mammoth.

And the Ponte dei Sospiri, a bit of Venice transplanted to rainy England.

During the day, tourist crowds, jostling students, and pushy hitmen for the local punting companies, chipped away at the facades, their H&M bags and straw hats and whispered bargaining giving the whole place a Cambridge-as-Cambridgeland feel. Even the staid University of Cambridge Press bookstore caved in to the visiting hordes, greeting patrons with large tables of “Cambridge in a Day” and “Ye Olde Cambridge” books. Postcards, always in sepia, made the olde seem even older.

But in the evening, it was impossibly beautiful. When the students and the members and the fellows trotted off in orderly fashion to their rooms and their dinners, it became another place entirely. Empty cobblestone streets, locked wrought-iron gates, church bells, cows grazing unflappably in the commons, ducks paddling in the now peaceful Cam. For the outsider, the not-quite-graduated University of Chicago student, a world away from the sirens and potholes of Hyde Park.

Signs of the Darwin year were everywhere, but understated. An exhibit of “Darwin-inspired art” at the Fitzwilliam, conferences if one looked carefully, a window of Darwinia in the Cambridge UP bookstore.. Signing up for my Cambridge Library Card, I looked idly at the display cases just outside the library office and found Darwin sketchbooks, caricatures of Darwin, correspondence between Darwin and his father.

The number of pubs in a town so small was astonishing. There were the chains, of course, which were lovely, but occasionally lacking in character. The Mitre—reliable, sometimes full of undergrads, promising Pub Trivia when the semester started. But the real jewels were hidden, The Pickerel, for instance, going for several hundred years, with its crooked ceilings and dark wood.

Thus inspired, we printed off a map of Cambridge pubs, intending to make our way through the list, and record our impressions in a blog—an other-blog, for the other-life.

Chicago is not human-scale. Each year it seeks new ways to wiggle its way into the lists of the world’s tallest buildings. Having lost the Olympic bid, though, it settles back into its old, sometimes shabby self. Potholes remain unfilled, life goes on as before. The sidewalks buckle from tree roots.

Cobblestone is restricted to the neo-Cambridge world of the University of Chicago, where professors are addressed by their first names. Nobody wears gowns here. Nobody cares if you walk on the lawns. Few traditions, but few pretenses. A little beauty lost, a little humility gained.

And so back to sentimentality and nostalgia:

Of the two roads I saw, one was the more uncertain. I took it---with hope---and it made no difference.

Springtime in Prague

Prague in spring sparkles -- it is a very different place from wintertime Prague, which is all fog-draped hills and damp cobblestone. The hills are now green, over-run with local dogs who sniff stinky things in the long grass, blithely ignoring the feeble cries of their aged owners. The cobblestone can scarcely be seen beneath the feet of tourists tramping doggedly through the streets and alleys following the umbrellas of their tour guides, hands clasping their souvenirs of choice....an open can of Staropramen (you can't do that in America!), "genuine Bohemian Crystal," perhaps a plastic Golem?

Blossoms are everywhere, and at lunchtime the parks that are hidden to all but the most intrepid tourists -- the park in the old Carmelite cloister in Mala Strana, for example, or the garden you can just barely see through the gate here, also in the Mala Strana -- fill up with locals...old ladies sit on benches grumbling, young couples flirt on the grass, solitary types pull out their sandwiches and the morning paper.


Despite the tourist crowds, it is easy enough to turn a corner and find yourself completely alone, as I did here in Mala Strana...










Sometimes even Kampa, the little (former) island just below Charles Bridge, that's with restaurants and bookshops, empties out.

Not for the faint of heart is Charles Bridge itself. There are several bridges across the river, but this is the oldest and is pedestrian-only. A bridge has been located on this spot for hundreds of years -- before the Charles Bridge, there was a bridge called the Judith Bridge located here. The statues are all from the 17th and 18th centuries, but there was a lone cross there at various points from the 14th century on. The repeated destruction and restoration of this cross, which was incorporated into a crucifixion scene in the Baroque period, indicates the bridge's role in various conflicts in the city's history --- the Hussite Wars, the invasion of the city by the Catholic troops of the Archbishop of Passau in 1611, and again in the 1640s by the Protestant armies of Christina of Sweden.

Today, traversing the Charles Bridge is a serious undertaking: it's packed with tourists, souvenir sellers, buskers, and pickpockets, and at least one part of it is always under scaffolding due to restoration work. The statue of St John Nepomuk, who was one of the most popular local saints, continues to be popular today. Poor Nepomuk, the queen of Bohemia's confessor in the very distant and murky past, met his end in the Vltava/Moldau, thrown in after he refused to divulge what the queen had told him in confession. People today touch his statue for good luck, and their ardour has left its mark in the shiny spots on his statue....

I have my own favourites, though. As someone who seems to always be on the move, despite being at heart a sometimes unadventurous homebody, I always give St Christopher, patron saint of travelers, a nod when I pass him on the bridge. There's something comforting about images of mighty St Christopher helping the tiny child across the river.

He always gets me thinking, though, of Schumann's settings of Heine in Dichterliebe, in particular the last song.... when the Dichter, the poet, having been disappointed in love, searches bitterly for a very large coffin --- a coffin so big that it can only be carried by giants, "die muessen noch starker sein wie der starke Christoph im Dom zu Koln am Rhein" -- the coffin will be so heavy, that he needs not one but 12 giants, and they have to be stronger even than the mighty St Christopher in Cologne Cathedral. The coffin isn't, of course, for himself, but for "die alte, boesen, Lieder" - the old, evil songs, the love songs he sang to his beloved...

I'd like to think Prague's Christopher stands watch over a rather happier group of travelers...