Photograph by Karsten Moran

When one is young one goes to school to get an education. Because my mother sacrificed her financial problems for years to send me to good schools I received a very good education.

What is the situation  then when one is 82 to keep getting an education? I sometimes tell my friends (the remaining few that I have that are still alive) that I am a purveyor of useless facts.

For years I have seen the famous image of a man seen from the back. It was not until I went into the arts section of my daily delivered NYTimes on paper on Friday, February the 7 that the artist in question was Caspar David Friedrich.

Here is the article without a paywall: Caspar David Friedrich

The arts writer Jason Farago writes exquisitely. I flagged the following with my little plastic stickums:

“A stranger I arrived; a stranger I depart”goes the opening of Schubert’s”Winterreise,” and at the end of this beautiful show [the one now at the Met] in late sepia drawings of caves and cemeteries made after Friedrich abandoned painting and lost his fame, this most German of artists depicted the German landscape and an almost alien terrain. I think one of the many reasons the Met’s exhibit feels so timely is just how much of a stranger Friedrich remained in landscape – and how much human longing he located within his rocks and and evergreens. Longing for God. Longing for stranger shores. Longing for death, maybe. I have my own longings now, my nostalgia for nature not yet human-authored, as I wonder through a climate as distant from Greifswald as from Babylon. But we may yet find peace, a measure of it, if we learn to see in the fog.

My mentor Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. once explained to our class in 1958 in Austin,Texas:

Brother Edwin entered our religion class in 1958 and asked the class while pouring water to the brim of a small glass and also that of a big glass, “Which is fuller?” The class answered predictably. Brother Edwin gently corrected us, “Both are equally full as I can not pour more water into either of them without overflowing them. But the bigger glass has more capacity. You need more water to fill it. The small glass can be easily filled. We can say the same about happiness. Some of us can be happy with little others with more. It is more difficult to be happy if you want more. A small happy person and a more-happy person are both equally happy.”
 

So I don’t care if some of my friends think I am a purveyor of useless facts. These newly learned facts enrich my life, whatever is left of it. I see it as pouring some water into an almost empty glass. I will spill into oblivion.