The lovely Nina and I are “stateside” once more after a two-week visit with our daughter’s young family in Vienna.
It was wonderful to see them — in particular, to be with our three-year-old and ten-month-old grandsons Liam and Declan gives us great happiness — but as someone once said, the best part of traveling is coming home again, and I couldn’t agree more. It seems as if we’ve been traveling constantly this year, far more than at any other time in our lives, and at sixty-three I’m finding it more and more exhausting. And as for economy-class air travel (our means are modest enough as to preclude more luxurious options): as the Earl of Chesterfield once said about sex, “the position is ridiculous, and the expense damnable.”
It’s just not in my nature to need the constant novelty and stimulus of travel (not that there’s much about Vienna that’s novel for us at this point, having spent so much time in that splendid place since our daughter moved there). I am perfectly content at home, with books and music and woods and sea and sky and the steady comforts of familiar things. (I realize that’s not so for everyone: the ideal retirement always seems to be imagined to be a life of constant travel, and even my Nina is much more of a happy wanderer than I am.)
Anyway, we’re back. I see a lot has been going on that’s worthy of comment. I’ve also got a thing or two to say about Vienna. The place is still a bastion of a rapidly vanishing Western way of life — and even, perhaps, of something even more universal. It will be good to get back to normal operations here, once I’ve rested up a bit.
One Comment
Glad that you and the lovely Nina (I always think of the song “Lovely Rita” when you say that) are back snug and safe, Malcolm. There is something beautiful about the Austrian-Hungarian lands that epitomizes the best of the past, of the Modern or Bourgeois Age. I miss it very much.