Let's Go Somewhere-1/6/2015 Ideas of Youth, India and a Cemetery Tour

Aleathia says:

I think it is the affliction of most young people to want to travel and see the world.  We think we are invincible.  We want to run to far away places and be a part of a culture so separate from the lives our parents laid out for us.  This is growing up.  This idea is so much a part of creating our own identity in this time and space.

My love of books exposed me to many far away places that all sounded so exciting and exotic.  They were places so out of my reach except on the pages, but deep inside I told myself I would get there someday.  The older I became the more reality set in and I understood that it was going to be hard enough to feed myself and provider shelter on a daily basis and that traipsing across the globe was going to be expensive. I traveled in my own country.  I have gone to Mexico and Canada.  In 2008, I finally made it to England and felt pretty damn fulfilled.

Recently, some acquaintances set off for India and I have watched their progress and adventure through Facebook postings.  Some small part of me is envious.  In my 20's, India was the place I wanted to go most.  I had a guide book that I carried back and forth across the country in hopes I would make it there sometime.  In the end I gave the book to someone who was going to actually go there and use it.  I am not sure why India was the place of my destiny all those years ago.  I didn't know anyone who had ever been, or anything about the country besides what was in that book, but I had an innate need to be there.

Today, traveling to these far off places isn't as enticing as it was.  If given the opportunity, I would love to tour Europe and see the world's most wonderful art galleries, but those days of saving the world, living like a pauper in a foreign land have left me.  These days I am in love with the idea of traveling my own country.  There is so much to explore in my own state that I have not managed to see.  I think in our young days we all have the idea that the grass is greener on the other side and then when we get older, we realize the quality of life is mostly dependent on how you live it, not where you are.


Ally says

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
                                                                             – Charles Baudelaire

I’ve always like cemeteries, even as a kid. Maybe it’s cause they’re quiet and sad and beautiful and you rarely see other people. They’re good Thinkin’ Places.

The more I travel, the more I go looking for old graves and old homes and over the years I’ve seen quite a few famous ones. So here’s a few of my favorite graves, in no particular order.

Since he got the opening quote Baudelaire gets to go first.

Charles Baudelaire – Poet (Paris)

Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – Philosophers (Paris)

Samuel Beckett - novelist/playwright/poet (Paris)

Marie Antoniette – Queen of France (St. Denis)

Jim Morrison – singer/songwriter/poet (Paris)

Oscar Wilde – novelist/playwright/satrist/poet (Paris)

Charles Bukowski – Poet/Novelist (San Pedro, CA)

John Keats – Poet (Rome)

Percy Bysshe Shelly – Poet (Rome)

Galileo Galilei – physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher (Florence)

Julius Caesar – Emperor/Soldier (Rome)

Jean Michel Basquiat – Painter (Brooklyn)

Jack Kerouac – novelist/poet  (Lowell, MA)

Mozart (Vienna, Austria...yes, he was buried in a pauper's grave and no, no one is really positive where it is, but this was close and it's a makeshift marker made from other graves and it's beautiful and quiet and amazing).

Beethoven (Vienna, Austria)

Gustav Klimt (Vienna, Austria)

and of course, Shakespeare (yes that's scaffolding and yes that's as close as I got. Read more about that here.)