Our amazing Indian summer continues (surely the term may stand, since it can only mean good things about Indians) – indeed for many in our part of the world it’s been a memorably perfect summer. Not so for much of America, as Joe and I saw on our trip around the country in May, June and July, the trip chronicled earlier on this blog: plenty of bad weather, enough to go around. And to everyone’s frustration, the statistics show that this summer of 2014 was, overall… an average summer. (This fits no one’s view, which proves that it’s correct.) The weekend just past featured the annual Garlic Festival in Saugerties, a jamboree that was once charming ($1 admission) and is now, like everything else, more squalid, more expensive ($10 admission), more popular and with only uncertain memories of the reason for its existence (a small number of stalls actually offer garlic products, including garlic ice cream, but most of the Fastival’s disgruntled vendors, complaining about taxes and the cost of renting their pitch, simply offer standard Midway fare, trinkets, dull craft objects, the usual rubbish, at exorbitant prices). Listening to NPR this morning I found myself plunged into some grand ecumenical conference featuring Judaic and Islamic and other scholars – the Dalai Lama was present too – and the Pope! – and I came in on the end of an Islamic speaker’s oration about the decay of beauty as a sacred concept (or any kind of concept, perhaps), citing what has happened to great Islamic centers – Isfahan was one he mentioned – where urban sprawl has destroyed, he said, any sense of a city dedicated to the deity as Lord of the beautiful, indeed as the spirit and principle of beauty itself. For my part I realized this first in Tuscany, on returning to Siena, having visited it first as a penniless teenager, arriving at night, exhausted and content to sleep in the grass across from the railway station; in the morning I climbed up into the old city, not knowing its history, not knowing what the Campo would be, or the Signoria – oh joy to be that innocent traveler about to be overwhelmed! I climbed the stairs to the little parapet at the top of the Signoria’s tower and gazed down on that peerless assemblage of tiled roofs that formed, small house by small house, the ancient topography of Siena – then. When I next came to Siena, tense with anticipation, I found to my amazement that in the intervening years it had acquired a modern carapace, a vast encircling city of the usual charmless architecture, enfolding what I had thought of as Siena in a cement embrace and turning the old city into an outdoor museum at its center. Yes, the palio is still run; the contrade still sport their colors, worn by every Sienese; but it’s all DisneySiena now.
Garlic in the Sky
And Isfahan too? Well, perhaps I won’t visit it – it was one of the last places I hoped yet to see – I’ll just stick with a virtual tour (I’m sure there are plenty) of the Blue Mosque. There’s only so much disheartening a heart can stand.
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