Beauty; glad to be human; Sunday evening

Good evening, everyone,

I had a lovely walk this afternoon, to and from the Haarlemmerstraat, Leiden's long pedestrian shopping street, which runs sort of parallel with the Old and New Rhine (no street is remotely straight in Leiden). The mission was frivolous (replace eye shadow), but the journey, as so often happens to me in this beautiful tiny city, was anything but frivolous.

If you have Google Earth, you can follow this routing:

My house, on 4e (4th) Binnenvestgracht #26, left out the door, then left again onto Kraaierstraat, across the Levendaal, to the New Rhine (on the far side; on the near side it's called the Utrechtse Veer, or Utrecht Feather (or maybe something else; one meaning of veer is feather). Then left on the New Rhine, and follow that to the convergence of the New and Old Rhine (there's also a small stretch of canal called the "Silent" Rhine). Then right, across the sliver that the Rhine has now become, to the Haarlemmerstraat.

So, mission accomplished, I wandered back along the New Rhine, which runs past the Town Hall and some very scenic brickwork. Just behind the Town Hall, I spotted what I later decided was a small fountain, but it had been boarded up for the winter, so nicely that I forgot that it really was a fountain. Someone was practicing again on the Town Hall's lovely carillon, so there was that music floating out over the wintery town. I came home more or less as I'd left, but found myself stopping and staring at the (mostly) lovely high houses and warehouses, most from the 18th, a few from the 17th, and some (the least attractive) from the 19th century. I struggled to explain (to anyone, including myself) how lovely the city is. I thought of my cats, who are utterly unaware of the joys of 17th century Dutch architecture. I realised again that one of the privileges of our species is to be aware of beauty. I tried, to myself, to describe why something was beautiful. I only tried this for a moment or two, remembering how hopeless it is to try to describe, for example, how beautiful certain pieces of music are. I just filled my eyes with the lovely homes on the Rhine.

By the time I got home, it was darkening a bit, and time for a tasty anise-star tea. It's interesting, how many of the most affecting things in life are free. The visuals in this little city are just wonderful.

So, off to read an interview of J.K. Rowling in Dutch in the weekend paper's magazine (published and delivered on Saturday, to give all the paper employees Sunday off, I guess). Then, to gear up for another week of dashes to the train. I'm ready for another holiday, but will have to wait until Christmas. Mr. Douglas and I hope to visit his son and family on their big catamaran, somewhere between Torrevieja (just south of Alicante) and Barcelona on Spain's east coast. We should find out this week a better idea of where they will be. I hope that my high school Spanish will suffice. Sun and sea in December would be lovely.