Sevilla, Spain December 18, 2004

On the very last leg of my most intensive European trip yet. Almost 3 weeks on the road - with so many stops in so many countries it's hard for me to even remember where it all started. But I will remember tomorrow, as I head back to Paris to pick up the late night flight on Monday back to NYC. The blur of European cities is racing in my mind - Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Koln, Munich, London, Madrid and now, Seville.
So I could go back and try and recount the intensity of all the travel and all the meetings and the multitude of restaurants and bars, of hotel rooms and and checkin countersm airport security checkstrains to the airport and taxis to the meetings, the endless procession of gates and airplane seats (window and aisle); the countless times I said something to so many different faces in so many different places, but I won't.
I will say that Seville is the opposite of my travels and so it is strange to end up here - to walk the well trodden streets of centuries and centuries of continuity - here things are lively and yet still. Lively with crowds spilling out of every bodega, of every cerveceria and restaurant chatting and drinking to the middle of the night, alive with the hidden squares and the shoulder wide alleys revealed in a crack between buildings that you would miss if you blinked as you scanned the buildings, vibrant with the happenstance of a flamenco singer, his guitarist and dancer, pouring their heart out into the night in a shed filled with smoke so thick that after an hour you stumble out into the clean air with a sense of liberation that makes you want to scream for joy. But this vibrancy is also a stillness - of timelessness and everpresentness of a place where each generation fills the human void left by those that came before to inhabit the physical environment that has a solid continuity whose weight cannot be described. So I am feeling very light and transient, very transcendent and disconnected, very ethereal almost physically none existent - I have no placeness. No physical location anywhere, I feel like I am a spirit of movement and non-rootedness. In a good and also a melancholy way. And then I encounter Sevilla with it's massive Girlada and Catedral, it's Belen nativity scenes and it's stand-ins who all look the part of South Spaniards that it's scary. Total rootedness, total here, now, then, in the future, total physicality.
It's an intense contrast for the transient traveller, one that kind of makes me sad. Strengthensing my sense of temporariness.
It's a beautiful place in the winter.