“In the year that King
Uzziah died, I saw the LORD sitting upon a throne,
high and lifted up, and
his train filled the temple.” Isaiah 6:1
Erik Mebust and I had coffee
together last weekend, and we talked about all his exciting plans for the next
several months. Erik will be studying
literature for a term at Kings’ College in London, and I was able to give him
some advice about museums, historical sites and churches. He also has two or three weeks after his term
finishes to do some travelling around the rest of Europe, and a big list of
places he’s dying to see. There’s Paris,
of course, and the Rhine Valley in Germany, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to see
the Alps, and he has a friend spending a term in Montpelier, down on the
Mediterranean Coast. And I was trying to
slow him down a bit. You don’t want to
spend half of your time on trains, after all, and you might well be able to go
back again later in life and try some of what you will need to miss this
time.
But of course, by American standards, all these
places are really quite close. This is
part of the wonder of Europe to an American.
In a few hours you can travel between places whose languages, histories,
foods, music, and architecture are completely different. New York State really isn’t all that
different from Minnesota. But Spain and
Poland are a world apart, and the distance is really about the same.
