Greetings from Spain
I am sincerely humbled by the outstanding job my Power Line colleagues have done in covering the significant developments in the news that have occurred in my absence over the past five days. Our sports editor´s pun on the celebration over the apprehension of Qusay and Uday, with "a father to be maimed later," was the wittiest I have seen in a long time, and both Deacon´s and Rocket Man´s coverage of political and military developments has been better than first rate. I write merely to convey a few impressions.
When we left for Madrid last week, I said we were in search of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I had no idea that images of the two would be ubiquitous, as they are, although the fighting spirit of Don Quixote is not apparent anywhere. At the same time I have been rereading Don Quixote for the first time since I was an undergraduate, and the book is nothing like I remember it. I am only 200 pages into it and it is providing much food for thought along with the sights of Madrid, Segovia, and Toledo, the last of which is in fact the capital of Don Quixote´s home province of la Mancha.
We retrieved Littler Trunk from a Spanish-language immersion program (the Rassias Program, God bless it) in Segovia. Part of the program involved her placement with a non-English speaking family whose warmth to her was fully reciprocated. We spent the afternoon with the family in Segovia, and they visited us the next evening in Madrid as well. Littler Trunk´s "house mother" cried repeatedly during the evening in advance of our saying good-bye. We were touched by how deeply the host family took her into their lives in only a matter of weeks.
In our hotel room in Madrid we caught CNN´s European outlet for news coverage. Even more so than the domestic version of CNN, it provides an utterly relentless stream of anti-American, anti-Israel coverage. Watching the Qusay-Uday stories required a taste for self-punishment far beyond any I have ever had. As Rocket Man has himself suggested over the past few days, it is simply imossible to understand the world-shaking events of the day through the gauzy bigfoot media filter provided by the likes of CNN.
Yesterday was our last day in Madrid, and we finally found time to spend in the great Prado museum. On Sundays, admission is free, so the museum is always crowded, but the museum has in addition put together a Titian ("Tiziano") exhibit that has created a frenzy. We fought the crowd and joined the frenzy.
We were most taken by the several Brueghel paintings included in the Prado collection. I have almost no education in the visual arts, but I found the Brueghel works a prod to learning. Below is Jan Brueghel´s "The Sense of Taste" from the Prado collection, one of a series on each of the senses that is -- how to say it? -- incredibly sensual.
Today we arrived at the coastal town of Marbella, a town that provides us the prospect of giving us many opportunities to explore what we learned about the senses from studying Brueghel´s series.
During our stay in Marbella we have free Internet access and time to try to catch up on events. I hope to be able to add something of substance to the site over the next few days. In the meantime, Vaya con Dios!
