Vitejte v Chebu

So, I am here.

And here I sit, in a cafe, first time by myself, first time successfully ordering a cappuccino, by myself, and indeed feeling rather pleased... with myself. It's amazing how nerve-racking these little things can be in a country that uses far more letters in its alphabet than I care for. Also, I never thought I'd see the day when German is as welcome a sight as English. Thank you, high school German teacher.

I am trying to take it all in, but I am so "in" it that it's hard to get my bearings. My new world is filled with color, with oldness, and with this new language that my mouth can't handle. I read a quote from Annie Dillard this morning: "We keep waking from a dream we can't recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees." That's exactly how it is. It might be a form of culture shock, but it's wonderful.

I am learning. The citizens of Cheb are proud of their town; they may not be religious, but somehow they managed to gather 9 million crowns to rebuild their cathedral's spires exactly the way it was before it was bombed in WWII. And they are knowledgeable in their history; they are not afraid to talk Communism, to talk Prague Spring, to tell their stories and share their views. They are open and honest, and it is refreshing and new.

The picture, for instance, is of a beautiful garden the city renovated only a few years ago. During Communism, it was known as a "jungle" of sorts--overgrown weeds, gnarly trees, litter and garbage everywhere. And then suddenly Communism vanished, and one of the first things the city did was to bring beauty back as much as they could. The buildings were re-painted (hence the bright colors everywhere), gardens were brought back to life--it was a 'rebellion' of beauty, in a sense. The garden, then, was renovated and had a sister garden in a German town only a few kilometers away. They brought in "gardens" from dozens of different countries, each one having its own little plot to represent a new world community, no longer ostracized by Communism. A couple years ago, they decided it was too expensive to keep up, so they simplified it down to what it is today in the photo you see. But what a beautiful story, yes?

I see hope here. I see life beginning again, and in more places than just gardens. I think it is in people too. Another thing I have learned: there is a great similarity between Czech people and American people--it is the simple fact that they are all people. Crazy, eh? It is ridiculous to stereotype, to assume, to generalize. The feelings, needs and wants that are felt in Grey Eagle, Minnesota are also felt in Cheb, Czech Republic. There is no one above, no one below. Simplistic, but true. And what is known is not always so readily understood, and truth is the only goal anyways.

'Welcome to the Real World'

Re.al.i.ty. noun. The world or the state of things as they actually exist.

We leave for Czech tomorrow. Tomorrow! I do not know what it is that I am feeling. I feel that tomorrow is inevitable, and so there is no need to feel extreme emotions. No matter if I am terribly excited or terrified, it shall come all the same, and nothing I do, say or feel will slow it down or speed it up. So I'm leaving.

I have been wondering, though. I wonder about life and its rhythms and how we look at it. It is almost the end of summer, and people are going back to school. It is "back to reality" now. But the thing is, what exactly is reality? I remember traveling around the UK for England Term a couple years ago, and we would lament to each other how horrible it would be when we would have to get back to "real life." We knew we were living The Dream--traveling, reading and writing for three months--but all dreams end. But when I got back to the United States, it was all wrong. It was not "reality" as I had left it--I didn't recognize it anymore, because I had been altered, along with my sense of what "reality" was. Thus, I went through a few months of a bitter "reality check," trying to come to terms with my own country. Reality became warped--nothing was familiar, or how I thought it should be, at least.

The truth is, we can't go "back to reality"--we are always in it. We never left. It is what we choose to make of the reality we live in--whether or not it will become familiar is an entirely different matter. This next year in Czech will be reality for me. All the traveling I have ever done--it is reality. All the "staying in one place" I have ever done--it is also reality.

You know, we live far too much in the future. I do, anyways. It's always, "Next week I will start eating better." "Tomorrow I will call my parents." "Next semester I will really start taking school seriously." Do we honestly think that "reality" will wait to happen until we want it to? Who says, "I am not really living my life right now, what I'm doing now doesn't count"? But that's our mentality. We think that when we reach a certain goal, age or season in life (graduation, job, marriage), that's when life "really begins." Bollocks. Live life now. You have no excuses. Reality is now, and you will always be in it.

Findings

I am officially done with training, and now they say I am a Teacher. Apparently I now have the authority to mold the brains of 300+ Czech students according to what I think proper. Or something.

So to celebrate, my mom and aunt flew down to Pasadena to spend the weekend with me. Yesterday we went to Huntington Gardens, where beautiful gardens imported from China, Japan and Australia (why Australia? There are no gardens in Australia) grace the rolling hills of Mr. Huntington's estate.

But that wasn't all; the estate also housed a gigantic library full of old books and manuscripts (Gutenberg Bible, anyone?), including an exhibit featuring the one and only Samuel Johnson. (Boswell: I asked, "If, Sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a newborn child with you, what would you do?" Johnson: "Why, Sir, I should not much like my company.") Next to Johnson's exhibit, a "double-elephant folio" of bird sketches by Charles Audubon filled a chunk of the adjoining room. Bah. As I looked at Audubon's larger-than-life sketches, I got a little twitchy and short of breath, and couldn't stand them for long. But the thing that caught my eye was at the bottom of the exhibit, on a little placard giving the history of the folio: "Almost all of Audubon's work was self-funded, and his neglected family was often poverty-stricken because of the consuming passion he placed on his profession." Audubon was so concerned with drawing pictures of nasty little winged rats that he drove his family into the poorhouse. But look what he has left us--the Audubon Society would be nothing without him, obviously. And Johnson was so consumed with using his gift of writing "correctly" and faithfully that we have more writings by him than almost any other author in history. He literally wrote himself into his grave.

And then, we stumbled into Huntington's art galleries. Sir Joshua Reynolds and Charles Gainsborough were suddenly transported from the British National Gallery to Pasadena, California. John Constable's "Salisbury Cathedral" loomed large in a forgotten corner. Canaletto. Rogier van der Weyden. Jacques-Louis David. Claude Lorrain. And then, I turned another corner and saw a J.M.W. Turner staring me in the face, as if to say, "Remember me?"
"What are you doing here?" I asked, more than a little bewildered. "Do you know you're in Pasadena?" I stared a little longer, shook my head, and went to go find the Americans.

But right before I left, Rembrandt tapped me on the shoulder. I stood there, dumbfounded. Rembrandt? In Pasadena? Why? The Lady with a Plume, with those sad, deep eyes, bore into mine. The placard said the painting was a collaboration between Rembrandt and a pupil from his studio, but the eyes were Rembrandt's. If you ever have a chance, look at Rembrandt's eyes. They are haunting, they dig down into your soul, and they will leave you shaken.

And then I ran headlong into the Americans. Lined up, one right after the other, was every single artist I had ever learned about in my art history classes. Motherwell. Frankenthaler. Diebenkorn. Bellows. Robert Henri. George Luks. Edward Hopper. Tears started to well up as I left, sorry that I only had fifteen minutes with them. They were old friends that I was allowed to only see in passing--reminders of the time that really wasn't so very long ago, when I immersed myself in their histories and wrote endless pages analyzing and critiquing, and reveling in their spirit of simply being. I sense myself drifting into a sort of post-college nostalgia, hence making this post much longer than it should be. But it was a good thing for me, to go back to those things that I loved. It was a reminder that it doesn't ever have to end, to be totally separated from the "real world." What Rembrandt paints about--that is the real world, really. He paints what we cannot say, what we can only express with our impotent tears and sighs.

Unimportances

“All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages its guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.” –Milan Kundera

I went to a wedding back in Minnesota this weekend—one last chance to see family and friends. It was wonderful; no one tripped down the aisle, everyone showed up on time, nothing was spilled on the bride’s dress… a fairytale beginning for the dear couple. But as I prepared to head back to Pasadena, chaos struck. I tried to save some money and fly standby, only to come back to my roommates crying after seven hopeless hours trying to find a flight into LAX. I flew to California early the next morning, wondering if my $300 booked ticket was worth it—if anything was worth it. Why was I going back? How did I ever convince myself that it would be okay to leave my home for a whole year, to completely start over? Why wasn’t I grounded in a job, in a familiar land, in solidity, like everyone else? Why wasn’t I getting married, too? My year in the Czech Republic seemed dismally unimportant in the whole scheme of things. I should be working toward a dream job, a family, a good retirement fund. I should want stability. I should want a 50-year plan. I should want a 401K in a time where the very concept of one is a myth.

But who am I fooling? It is the unimportant things that are the most important, says Kundera. I go through the days here literally hour by hour, information session by information session. Our days are governed by mealtimes. We get fat, and we swear we will wake up the next morning at 6 and run it all off. We live for the weekends. (On Saturday, we are going to the beach.) We are tired. We set ourselves with the challenge of making it through the next teaching practicum, and then wake up again the next morning and do it all over again. Life is a series of small goals, and it is easy to lose sight of the big picture.

So where is the balance? It is in simply being, of course. Later on in his book Kundera writes, “There is no more boisterous, no more unanimous agreement than the agreement with being.” The balance is in being able to recall, to look back at where we’ve come from and see where the small things got us. The difference Kundera writes about is when we choose willingly to forget the small unimportances. If this happens—and it does happen, too often—that is when the war turns ugly. The unimportances, for better or for worse, are what change the world. Built from the bottom up, they catch us by surprise when the end result—that “big picture” that we have so lovingly planned out—turns out much differently than we ever intended.