An Early or Late Impression

To spend one's mornings in still, productive analysis of the clustered shadows of the Basilica, one's afternoons anywhere in church or campo, on canal or lagoon, and one's evenings in starlight gossip at Florian's, feeling the sea-breeze throb languidly between the two great pillars of the Piazzetta and over the low black domes of the church—this, I consider, is to be as happy as is consistent with the preservation of reason.

—Henry James, “Venice:  An Early Impression”

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Brown Palazzo

City of Mirrors

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

—Erica Jong

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Canal with Gondolas

White Swan of Cities

White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest . . . White phantom city, whose untrodden streets Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Venice"

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Venice

Every Dreamer Knows

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

—Judith Thurman

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Gondola, Lago di Como

A Sun-Drenched Elsewhere

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

—Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad:  The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

image: Palazzo di Treviso su un corso d'acqua, Morningfrost

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Treviso-canale04.jpg

Having New Eyes

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

image: Treviso, Veneto, Italy, Pikkus

Such Cartography

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography, to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

(Happy birthday to my father, Boyd Cochrell, an important part of my communal history and book.  I miss him.)

image:  Borghetto sul Mincio, Valecin

And You and I Are Here

It is a glorious privilege to live, to know, to act, to listen, to behold, to love.  To look up at the blue summer sky; to see the sun sink slowly beyond the line of the horizon; to watch the worlds come twinkling into view, first one by one, and the myriads that no man can count, and lo! the universe is white with them; and you and I are here.
—Marco Morrow 

image:  Busseto – Santa Maria degli Angeli, Tiesse

The Homing Sentiment

This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome—there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.
 —Edward Abbey

image:  Verona, Piazza Erbe, VEJA.it

My Ineffable Happiness

Listen: I am ideally happy. My happiness is a kind of challenge. As I wander along the streets and the squares and the paths by the canal, absently sensing the lips of dampness through my worn soles, I carry proudly my ineffable happiness. The centuries will roll by, and schoolboys will yawn over the history of our upheavals; everything will pass, but my happiness, dear, my happiness will remain, in the moist reflection of a street lamp, in the cautious bend of stone steps that descend into the canal's black waters, in the smiles of a dancing couple, in everything with which God so generously surrounds human loneliness.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters, 1940-1977

image:  Verona bridge