The Blue Rigi

Greetings from Palo Alto faithful Entre readers! I made it back safely! Though, in my last day in Washington DC I did catch a fever and its cold is still with me. Sore throat, coughing, congestion. All good stuff to have after a month of traveling. Its keeping me at home writing and catching up with myself.

And likewise my rechargeable batteries in my camera have lost all desire to recharge right on cue of returning home. So I can't look at my photos, nor share any just yet. But look at this. Its a watercolor painting done by JMW Turner in 1841. I saw this at the Tate Britain on a whim one afternoon while in London and just now tried to find a reproduction of it on the internet. It is the greatest watercolor i have ever seen and it was an unexpected find that day. They had an entire exhibit on his watercolors, but this one you cant too easily walk away from. I knew nothing of its subject or its artist before I walked into the room but there I stood for some time suddenly deeply in awe of both.

Three weeks later I had met up with Christian in Basel and we had planned a trip into the alps during my stay. I had no idea exactly where we were going or how we would get there. It turned out that the mountain we climbed was Rigi Kulm. We took a steamer boat across that same lake, we climbed to the corner tip of that same mountain in Turner's watercolor. By then I had forgotten the name of the picture, Blue Rigi, because at the time the name didnt mean anything to me, only the image did. Now this afternoon, finding that the image I was looking for of Turner's watercolor was now a place I had just been, a place of stunning, ineffable beauty, I am laughing at all the small amazing stories that lie in the spaces and chance acts that brought me to see this painting, its mountain, and the reproduction of them you see above. What's this laugh?