In the 24 hours before I took the LIRR to the Air Train to a 9.5 hour American Airlines flight to a shuttle bus across the tarmac of Athens International Airport Eleftherios Venizelos to a 25 minute flight to the Greek island of Paros, I finished scheduling a week and a half of content and filed a 2,000 word draft for my full-time job, filed my last dance review until September, took a Pilates class, packed my bags, and developed great expectations for how much reading I’d get done on my week-long trip.
I read maybe 100 pages of East of Eden across various Greek beaches. I finished the book on the 10 hour flight home. (Fantastic.) What I did on my vacation, for the most part, was eat, sleep, drink, dance, and swim in the ocean. I felt months of stress erode from my body, lapped away by the salty Aegean Sea.
How easy it is to forget that such simple pleasures are often well within grasp in our day to day lives: to enjoy a glass of wine or a cappuccino at a café or wine bar with a book or journal, to sit outside simply to take in your surroundings, to try out the sound of a new language. It takes a trip halfway around the world sometimes to discover the ways you are not truly living.
I know I am not alone in this phenomena, to the degree that this is a cliché: a millennial traveling to a new country to discover the benefits of slowing down, wondering, “Have I got it all wrong?”
Yet I make no illusions about the fact that I work hard so that I may have the experience of going to a new country, to sit in front of the ocean with a freddo espresso or a margarita-adjacent cocktail.
I am ostensibly invested in the experience of pleasure. This is what we get from the arts: a visit to the museum, a trip to the ballet or opera, a spin through a playlist of Delibes or Debussy impart their own benefits, physically and otherwise. Still, I know that I impart pressure to these tasks, a drive to drag myself toward connoisseurship. The excitement about having so much more to uncover can sometimes register as anxiety about not knowing enough. This is the very sentiment that keeps so many people away from the arts.
The irony is that it is enough simply to experience—to sit in an audience, to have an audience with an artwork. You do not have to have an opinion right away or a take any more complex than whether you liked it or not. Turn the experience over in your mind. Take pleasure in the way in sweeps over you. Doesn’t it feel good to be present, to have your hands free and your eyes away from a screen? Isn’t it nice to let something wash over you?
I am currently…
Reading: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Listening to: Vanitas by La Niña, Yenna by Marina Satti
Planning to attend: City Center’s annual Fall for Dance festival (tickets go on sale
Drinking: Moka pot coffee, black
Practicing: Spanish
Starting: To learn a bit of Polish and French
Here’s what you need to know in the world of art and culture:
You have heard me wax poetic about the Elgin Marbles many times now. But did you know there are other antiquities that are in dispute? The New York Times recently detailed the international fight over Priam’s Treasure—a lot of jewels, gold, and other objects which German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated in modern-day Turkey in the 1870s. During World War II, Soviet troops brought them to Russia, where they remain, despite ongoing claims of ownership from Turkey and Germany both.
