From Cali with love
July 31: Monday
I used to think the best invention ever would be a happy ray (not for me), but now I'm starting to think that it would be teleportation. At about the last minute, my flight was changed. My trip would have originally been a simple flight from SF to LA to Vienna, arriving in Austria's capital at around noon. Now, there's a second middleman: Zurich, Switzerland. I have to stay here in Los Angeles for an extra six hours, surrounded by people who are probably by any physiological standard automatically cooler than me, and just... wait. Vienna by noon? More like Vienna by 7 PM. At least I have reading material.
An Expected Journey: The Hobbit and Me
I'm a pretty avid reader. I read history, of course. A lot of history. And I reread Harry Potter every year. I read graphic novels. I read American political news until it hurts too much. And I'm a big, big Lord of the Rings fan. Now, this trip to Austria has occurred in the midst of a Lord of the Rings rereading, so I've brought The Return of the King with me.
But I also decided to bring The Hobbit. More specifically, the German-language version. For one thing, I need all the German help I can get, but for another thing, I find it to be quite a fun and fascinating exercise, with a fair amount of translation surprises (Bilbo Baggins has become "Bilbo Beutlin." I understand that "Beutel" means a bag or a pouch, so it's pretty fitting, but I'll never get used to it).
Here on my trip to Vienna, I sort of feel like a hobbit myself. Boy, does the world seem big so suddenly. It seems big and I haven't even left the state of California yet. Like Bilbo, I'm a willing participant on this journey, countered by a good deal of nervous reluctance. Adventures are scary, see. At home, everything is calm and nice and familiar. But the "out-there" is so... out there. I've never been to Europe beyond its westernmost country - Portugal - and I've never really traveled by myself. I'm not an adventurer. I'm a hobbit.
But I can say now that leaving San Francisco - the Shire - has already inspired a little pep in my step. And like Bilbo Baggins, I'm ready to fulfill my quest.
Bilbo and I also both have hairy feet.
City of Angels
So, here's something that struck me about LA, just from looking down from the plane as we land. And maybe I was already sort of aware of this, but seeing the entire city before my eyes made me realize it.
Los Angeles is just a geographic anomaly.
Or rather, it lacks geographic anomalies. I've been to plenty of larger cities - San Francisco, Boston, Lisbon, Minneapolis... All of them have a distinctive feature: they're bound on the water. Whether by bays or by rivers, they are all representatives of the thesis that civilization is founded on water: the most necessary ingredient of life. These cities, viewed from above, have anomalous shapes, because they're mashed and stretched and sometimes even torn in two by the shape of the ocean or the winds of their rivers. That's the way London is too. And Berlin.
And Vienna! The Danube! The great source of water and the commercial waterway. Thousands of tons of blue flowing through the city every minute! No wonder the Romans wanted to found a city there, over two thousand years ago.
LA? Not so much. Just grids and grids. Very little natural shaping, at least in the center area. And that's not bad. Heck, Los Angeles is amazing. But it really made me think.
Revelation 21:6
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life.
On Travel
So I mentioned near the beginning that I think teleportation is an ideal invention. That's not entirely true. Air travel still has its uses. If I didn't have an airport, I wouldn't have time to make these early blog posts, for example. But there's nod denying that travel can be a pain.
So I don't dislike travelling. But I don't particularly like travelling. It's that awkward transition. I think of it like the Isaac Asimov quote:
"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
See. Just a troublesome transition. A transition where I might lose some stuff, or get a flight or two delayed, but in the end it's the only thing to be scared of. Because once I'm there, well, I'm there.
Maybe that was too morbid an analogy. But hey - look at Isaac Asimov and Franz Josef of Austria (i.e. Vienna). Franz Josef completes the beard that Isaac started! Isn't that cute?
Sorry.
