On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking, 2006) (Penguin, 2007)

My copy of the 2007 softcover edition of On the Road: the Original Scroll

On the Road: the Original Scroll (Viking, 2006) is a transcript of Jack Kerouac's legendary "scroll," the first draft of On the Road (Viking, 1957).  Jim Irsay—current owner and CEO of the Indianapolis Colts— paid $2.43 million for it at auction in 2001.

I read On the Road twice back in the nineties. I will likely read it a third time.  After my first reading I thought it wasn't much of a book and I wondered what all the hoopla was about. It didn't get better with the second reading. Well, ahem, putting aside why I would've wanted to read this disappointment a second time, why would I consider reading it a third time?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

But stick around. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I finish writing this.

On the Road is not a work of art by any definition of art I’ve ever used. The prose isn’t transcendent (The Great Gatsby) or captivating (The Catcher in the Rye). The story is just real life with the names changed. The structure is uncomplicated: it isn’t symbolic, it isn’t multi-layered, the story doesn’t start out linear but then go in a circle or collapse on itself. There really isn’t anything to “get.”

Or is there?  Maybe there is.  Maybe that's why I keep reading the novel: I keep thinking it has something to "get" and I'm not getting it.

U.S. 50 in central Nevada

The On the Road characters are antiheroes. Nothing compelling about that. What is compelling is their collective unlikability, an odd quality in the midst of other mid-century fictional characters—Ellison's Invisible Man, Holden Caulfield, Yossarian, and Humbert Humbert among them. The On the Road characters might give Quilty and Captain Queeg a run for their money.

I don’t envy the way Sal Paradise (Kerouac's alter ego) and his associates live their lives. I wouldn’t want to be any one of them for five minutes. Moreover, Paradise and Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) are blind to the pathology of their muse, Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). Beyond whatever charisma he might have, Moriarity is simply an uneducated barroom-brawler, drunk, car thief, sex addict, parvenu, and revolving-door prisoner who can’t hold a job or get along with anyone except Paradise and Marx, Ivy-Leaguers to whom he is painfully solicitous. He peppers his antisocial self-absorption with occasional efforts to enter the enlightened conversation going on around him, and when he does he spouts doubletalk.

In the background material that I've read I learned that Kerouac and Ginsberg in real life were fatally attracted to Cassady who, to gain and keep their attention or their potential monetary generosity or both, was desperate to be accepted by these two. His repeated doubletalk episodes are solid evidence of his wish to fit in. Perhaps he never realized he had them at hello.

Kerouac and Ginsberg were intellectual middle-class Ivy-Leaguers.  And they believed that they and their Columbia University mates were onto some new way of living and thinking that was exalted, superior, ahead of its time, and intellectual, a way-of-being they labeled “beat” without coherently defining it. When Cassady joined them he was a gorilla in a tux— incongruence incarnate—a man leading an unintellectual antisocial life which Kerouac and Ginsberg misunderstood and romanticized, turning it upside-down in their minds, causing or allowing them to view Cassady as the very avatar of “beat.”

I readily confess I've never understood "beat." I have no idea what it means, if it has a meaning. I've never understood what Kerouac and Ginsberg saw in Cassady. I've never understood why they stooped to Cassady's level in their travels with him.

So maybe all the foregoing is why I bought and read On the Road: the Original Scroll when Penguin Classics published it in paperback in 2007.

"The Scroll," housed at the New York Public Library

Kerouac wrote the scroll in April 1951 in one three-week-long marathon of transferring unfiltered thought onto paper.  (See note 1.)  As it appears in On the Road: the Original Scroll, it is raw, the real-life names haven’t been changed, the sexual (including gay-sex) references censored from On the Road are fully intact, and the misspellings and erroneous place-names haven’t been corrected.  I now believe my key to “getting” On the Road (i.e., the 1957 published version) is the scroll—the text, certainly, but also its very existence in legend and fact and the Benzedrine-nicotine-caffeine-fed manner in which Kerouac wrote it.

I don’t normally delve into background sources to understand a work.  I’m from the “New Criticism” school of literary analysis, and so I stick to the text and avoid things like correspondence, journals, biography, other literary analyses, etc.  But I had had so much trouble “getting" On the Road I decided to make an exception.  Here’s what I learned.

What turned into “beat” started out in the mid-forties as the “New Vision,” which Kerouac and a handful of his Columbia friends vaguely discussed among themselves.  In a nutshell, Kerouac et al. were disturbed by the atomic bomb and by the new world in which the spectre of imminent nuclear annihilation haunted everyone every day.  And so they were going to do something and do it through literature.  But their “New Vision,” just like its later incarnation “beat,” was undefined.  One of them, Lucien Carr, later said “New Vision” was deliberately left undefined.

During this early period Kerouac heard a Times Square street junky named Herbert Huncke use “beat” to refer to his life in the street—“beat,” as in beat-up, beaten-down, and down-and-out.  Kerouac thought he heard something impish and rebellious in Huncke’s use of “beat,” and so began to apply it to this “New Vision” in a way that transformed “beat” into something rebellious: beat-down, yes, but refusing to be down-and-out. Yet, as “beat” replaced “New Vision,” the name-change was cosmetic only and the concept remained as nebulous as ever.

The brains of the "Beats": (L-R) Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr at Columbia University.

Kerouac’s purported attempts in the fifties to define “beat” in his various writings and interviews began with what appeared to be a kind of nibbling around the edges of an idea but devolved quickly into snarky double-talk.

The Beats' inability or refusal to coherently define “beat” opened my eyes and at some point I had a Gestalt moment: Kerouac’s and Ginsberg’s branding Cassady’s way-of-being as “beat” justified their palling-around with him, justified their aping him whenever the mood struck them and using him for their own purposes (literary for Kerouac, sexual for Ginsberg), meanwhile pitching the “beat” lifestyle as an intellectual product, all of which was nothing more or less than the rationalization of boorishness and irresponsibility—act like licentious teenagers or nihilists, or in Cassady/Moriarity’s case a drunken sailor on shore leave, and in any event without restraint or remorse; label the cretinous behavior as “beat”; babble in double-talk that “beat” is an intellectual construct and, if it has to be explained at all, you’ll never “get it”; and then see how many people freeze under this barely-veiled threat to their own intellectuality.

I fell for it in my own way.

Kerouac and Ginsberg had to have been two of the most fucked-up Ivy-Leaguers in history for having admired a guy like Cassady in the first place, chased him back and forth cross-country just to be around him, and then written books and poems about him as if he were a saint or a genius instead of a low-class fistfight-starting career-criminal sex fiend parvenu who never accomplished anything that anyone with any horse-sense, then or now, would call success.

🔻

Before Kerouac arrived on the literary scene, it wasn’t completely unheard of for a writer to write a first draft without bothering to get grammar and punctuation or even syntax exactly right.  But Kerouac seems to have invented the vomit-whatever-is-in-your-head-don’t-worry-about-anything writing method that has become orthodoxy, not only for psychotherapists who counsel their patients to keep a journal but for teachers in professional creative-writing workshops—let it flow, let it all just come out, don’t filter, don’t edit, don’t worry about grammar or spelling or punctuation or syntax or anything, just get it down on paper.  Kerouac called this “spontaneous prose.”

Jack Kerouac and his scroll, 1950

Years ago I stumbled upon Kerouac’s theory of “spontaneous prose” in a 1955 letter to Malcolm Cowley, an influential critic who helped Kerouac sell his manuscript to Viking.  Part of the letter had been reprinted in Advice to Writers: a Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights (Vintage Books, 2000), one of my bathroom books.

“Never did tell you my theory of writing.  If it isn’t spontaneous, right unto the very sound of the mind, it can only be crafty and revised, by which the paradox arises, we get what a man has hidden, i.e., his craft, instead of what we need, what a man has shown, i.e., blown (like jazz musician or rose)—

"The requirements for prose & verse are the same, i.e., blow—What a man most wants to hide, revise, and un-say is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for—Every doctor knows, every Prophet knows the convulsion of truth.—Let the writer open his mouth & yap it like Shakespeare and get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence—”

Kerouac submitted his book to Viking, a major publisher in New York that had John Steinbeck and Saul Bellow, among others, as clients. Since Kerouac would have known that all other books at Viking and at any other big publishing house would go through an editing and polishing process, he surely would have known that these processes would erase from his prose any evidence of spontaneity. Therefore he is saying implicitly to Cowley in this letter that when a writer blows his work it ought to remain unedited and raw: unhidden, unrevised, and said irrecoverably once, the way it comes. Kerouac handed to Viking his raw 120-foot-long blown scroll—a bushel of strawberries that Viking turned into a big pink smoothie.

It took nearly fifty years but in 2006 we finally got our hands on the "spontaneous prose" of Jack Kerouac's masterwork, On the Road, with On the Road: The Original Scroll. The scroll demonstrates what the polished 1957 On the Road could not: Kerouac’s creation was not the simple, unimaginative novel, On the Road, about a traveling narcissistic Ivy League dilettante pseudo-rebel and his pals who wanted to live without rules and boundaries set by others.  In my view, based on my close reading of it, the scroll was about blowing.  If the scroll had remained unedited, this blowing theme would have been reflected in three ways—(1) in the story of people letting it all just come out, unfiltered and unedited, etc.; (2) in the act of Kerouac's three weeks of blowing; and (3) in the novel's prose style and structure. Instead, the editors at Viking squandered the opportunity to publish a true work of art and began to remake it into something they thought might become saleable. In contrast to the polished writing we ultimately find in 1957's On the Road, Kerouac—the man and writer—is blowing the scroll, coming out unfiltered and unedited, not worrying about consequences—i.e., grammar, spelling, punctuation, syntax, whether it made any sense, or whether anyone but Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg would ever read it. And all the while he's telling a tale about lives that are lived by letting it all just come out, unfiltered and unedited, not worrying about consequences. Imagine a book about the clarity of water written on crystal-clear water you poured out of a pitcher. The scroll was both medium and message.  By the time Viking finished polishing On the Road in 1957, the medium and message had been lost—smoothed to smithereens, really.  At least that’s my best guess for why I still don’t “get" the 1957 novel.  Because I “get” the scroll.

Watts Towers

When Kerouac was writing it, the emerging Scroll was performance art.  Today, the completed Scroll is a work of avant-garde art, like the Watts Towers or the Vietnam War Memorial on the Washington Mall.  Take them or leave them as art.  But they are also cultural landmarks.  They are artifacts of history.  They are history.  Sadly, Viking remade Kerouac’s work-of-art into a watered-down, mass-market, poor-man’s version of the scroll that bears little resemblance to the original except in the story and characters, the two weakest elements of the scroll.

A novel like Last Exit to Brooklyn, a masterpiece of American nihilism, is what On the Road might have become if Kerouac had had a forward-thinking editor and a novelist’s imagination.  Better yet, we and our elders would’ve had the scroll on our bookshelves and in our backpacks all these years if Viking had had the guts, the insight, and the foresight to leave it the hell alone.

Insight: Remember the way Rock ‘N Roll sounded in the movies in the sixties and on TV shows like "Dragnet," how it sounded like some grown-up’s lame idea of what Rock ‘N Roll was supposed to sound like because that’s the way it sounded to them because they were listening through a Frank Sinatra/Doris Day/Benny Goodman/Les Brown filter?  The grown-ups didn’t “get” Rock ‘N Roll. Viking’s editors didn’t “get” the scroll because they weren’t prepared to think outside the box.  Or maybe they just weren’t prepared to try and sell a book that required readers to think outside the box.  Whatever.  They edited the scroll the way they would’ve edited any manuscript from a conventional-but-undisciplined writer, like Thomas Wolfe for example, who worried himself almost to suicide trying to be disciplined.  Kerouac, on the other hand, consciously rejected discipline.

You don’t take a manuscript like the scroll and edit it, much less edit it until it sounds conventional.  You don’t polish it: that defeats the purpose.  On the Road doesn’t sound like Kerouac “letting it all just come out.”  It sounds very Les Brown to my Rock ‘N Roll ears.  Or I should say it sounds very Les Brown to my John Coltrane bop ears.  No wonder I never “got” On the Road.  All there had ever been to “get” was the parallel between, on the one hand, the way the raw, unedited scroll sounded in the reader's head as a result of Kerouac's having blown it like a jazz musician; and, on the other hand, the raw, unedited manner in which he and his associates lived their lives.  Once Viking had polished the raw, unedited scroll into On the Road, all that remained was a pointless story of men acting like incorrigible children and scofflaws.  There was nothing left to “get.”

Bingo.

You and I and everyone else must separate 1957’s On the Road from the scroll because when Kerouac waxes about On the Road he’s talking about the scroll.  I defy anyone to read the two versions and see On the Road any longer—if he or she ever did—as an exemplar of “spontaneous prose.”  While the scroll is patently spontaneous, we can now see that On the Road is everything Kerouac said he was trying to avoid. (See Note 2.)

🔻

Hemingway at work on For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The First World War (1914-1918) blew the minds of untold thousands of people in Europe, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos in Paris and T.S. Eliot in England.  It turned their world inside out and turned them and many others fatalistic.  Gertrude Stein, referring to the American expatriates, told Hemingway, "You are all a lost generation."  These writers were “lost” because they were disillusioned and set back on their heels: How could a war like that have happened?  In a world where that could happen, what's the point of life?  Their rejection of this world and the people who had run it into a ditch was visceral and unconscious.   From their American exclaves in Europe they reacted with downbeat anti-heroic stories, novels, and poems.

A generation later, the atom bomb blew the minds of a lot of people, once the enormity of what it meant for the future of humanity had set in.  A new generation of thinkers and writers, including the Beats, became fatalistic.

In my humble opinion, however, the Beat Generation was simply a post-WWII, self-important, and inferior version of the Lost Generation.  From my background reading I know I’m not alone in this assessment.

I see two key differences between the Lost Generation and the Beats. The first is that despite its being a reaction to WWI, the Lost Generation had no social or political agenda.  The war had affected their psyches, but Hemingway and his pals only saw themselves as what they were—individual writers trying to move the literature ball downfield from where Tolstoy, Chekhov, Flaubert, Ibsen, Twain, Tennyson, and the other nineteenth century greats had left it.  The Beats, on the other hand, reacted to the atom bomb, not viscerally and unconsciously, but with a willful and purposeful rejection of the way the world worked, intending to reflect this rebellion in their writing.

The second key difference is the level of talent.  Hemingway and the writers of the Lost Generation had an ocean of talent and, except for Ginsberg, the Beats had a cozy swimming hole and delusions of grandeur.  (See Note 3.)

 

Fashion-forward display at "The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion and Rock 'N Roll" at SF's Palace of the Legion of Honor, 16 July 2017

The members of the Lost Generation talked quite a bit about the slings and arrows of the writing life and sometimes about their literary forebears.  But they didn't talk much about writing: they wrote.  The Beats, apart from Kerouac and Ginsberg, seem to have talked more than they wrote.  All of the Beats saw themselves as leaders of a movement and an elite social underground.  They were smarter and better than everyone else because they were the only ones who could see that the rest of us lived the lives society expected us to live.  The rest of us did what we were told.  The Beats weren’t going to do that.  They were going to do the opposite.  Ironically, whereas the Lost Generation produced critically-acclaimed world literature, the Beats, with the exception of Ginsberg and arguably Kerouac's Scroll, did the opposite and on a small scale.

🔻

More irony: Kerouac disdained the "Hippy movement" when it came around.  It’s ironic because the Beats were closer to the Hippies than Kerouac cared to believe.  With their willful and purposeful rejection of society, responsibility, and plain old-fashioned rules, the Hippies could have been the Beats' philosophic offspring.

Display of books considered popular among members of the Sixties Generation (or their professors) at "The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock N' Roll" at SF's Palace of the Legion of Honor, 16 July 2017

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[1] Kerouac taped sheets of tracing paper or teletype paper (accounts differ) together end-to-end to create a scroll he could feed through his typewriter so he wouldn’t have to stop writing every few minutes to change paper and hence stop his creative flow. “The Scroll” ended up as one paragraph 120 feet long.  Except for some missing edges gnawed by a dog who must have been looking for the definition of “Beat,” The Scroll is housed in the New York Public Library.

[2] I feel like I’m the kid in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  What were people looking at all these years?  Did they really think On the Road was “spontaneous prose”?  Did they believe it just because Kerouac said it was?  (Or rather, seemed to say it was.)  From my first reading of it I knew something was out of whack, that there was some kind of disconnect between what the book was supposed to be and what it was.  I just couldn’t put my finger on it until I began reading The Scroll and saw for the first time what Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” really looked like.   But in the end, like Faust and Joe Hardy, Kerouac sold his soul to the Devil.  He wanted to be published so badly he surrendered his pioneering art to the men with blue pencils.  He stood aside (or put up a weak fight) as Viking edited all the spontaneity and "the convulsion of truth" out of his writing, made it "crafty and revised, … precisely what Literature [was not] waiting and bleeding for."

[3] Ironically, it was the Lost Generation who produced literary grandeur, from the twenties to the forties: The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front,"To Brooklyn Bridge," The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the first of The Cantos, Look Homeward, Angel, and the U.S.A. trilogy.  Allen Ginsberg’s slim poetry collection, Howl, stands as the only piece of outstanding literature the core Beats ever published.  One might make a case for William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, but Burroughs was on the periphery and didn’t consider himself one of the Beats.  And I suppose one could now make the case for The Scroll, a better title for which would be On the Road: the Restored Text, although even in its restored state I'm reluctant to call it "outstanding literature.”   I'll withhold final judgment until I've reread it at least once or twice.

Viking Mediterranean Cruise

 

Rome 

We left Sacramento by air around 8AM Pacific Time on Monday the 24th of February and landed in Rome the next morning around 8:30 Central European Time.

As part of our cruise package we began our trip to Rome with a few days in the Westin Excelsior Hotel. We were so tired when we arrived Tuesday morning, we slept nearly all day. 

Ready or not, Wednesday was our first full vertical day in Rome. By the end of the day, however, I was exhausted again. I was so exhausted I would begin a sentence saying something coherently, and before the end of the sentence I would literally be speaking jibberish. 

Piazza della Republica

On the Piazza della Republica

The first building we explored was the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels and Martyrs, across from the Piazza della Republica and near the National Museum of Rome.

I was so impressed I almost became a Catholic.

⁋   ⁋   ⁋

The National Museum of Rome holds the world's largest collection of ancient Roman sculpture.

Caesar Augustus

Marcus Aurelius

Typical Roman street scene

Commuter parking, not a motorcycle dealership

More commuter parking

Random second floor planter box

The Spanish Steps

Via del Corso

Via del Corso is the Rodeo Drive, 5th Avenue, and Champs-Élysees of Rome.  You will find every high-end brand here with its own brick-and-mortar shop: Prada, Gucci, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, Tag Huer, Hermès, Breitling, Zara, Dolce & Gabana, Bulgari, Fendi, Dior, Chanel, United Colors of Benneton, Jimmy Choo, Mont Blanc, Tiffany, etc., etc., etc.  Other known brands with shops on Via del Corso or adjacent streets: Nike, Sephora, New Balance, Gap, Skechers, The North Face, and Calvin Klein.

Fabriano shop on Via del Barbuino

Fabriano is an old (1264 C.E.), high-end paper maker.  Stores like this sell loose paper, notebooks, journals, and fountain pens.

And for the record, on any given street we walked in Rome, I saw more fountain pen shops than there are in all 23,000 square miles of northern California. 

At Trevi Fountain

It was winter and off-season, and yet every attraction was crowded in Rome.  The outside of the Colosseum was so crowded we couldn't get close enough to get a decent photo without walking down a steep ramp that would've required an equally steep and ultimately unacceptable return trip uphill.  Here are the best photos we could get from a far distance.

The only pizza I ate away from the ship was in Rome and I didn't like it.  It was a four-cheese pizza at Tempio di Bacco, and at least one of the cheeses tasted a lot like backyard dirt. Nevertheless, I did eat it all.

I have three levels of edibility.  First, food I like and so I eat it.  Second, food I don't like but I eat it anyway because someone else cooked it and I can see/smell that I can eat it without vomiting.  Third, food I can't eat.  The Roman pizza was a category 2.

Cappuccino and Maritozzo. One day I had both items for breakfast and lunch.

⁋    ⁋    ⁋ 

I have a serious recommendation for anyone booking a cruise that will begin in Rome and not travel north to Milan, Florence, or Venice.  If you need or expect or wish to buy any clothing or shoes or accessories on your trip, buy them in Rome.  If you don't, you'll regret it.

Rome has shops everywhere. Start on Via del Corso, then branch out in concentric circles, if necessary. You will find something you want to buy, I guarantee it. On the other hand, if you leave Rome thinking you will find an article of clothing in one city or another that won't make you look like you're blind or that you don't own a mirror, pray you come to your senses, find the ship's captain, and tell him to turn the ship around, you need one more day in Rome.  It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is to find a decent shop of any kind in Naples. 

Viking Star

 

Selfie while awaiting the ship's elevator

We've watched TV commercials for Viking since 2013, ever since we began watching British detective shows on PBS Masterpiece Mystery.  I decided back then that if we ever became old enough to go on a cruise, it would have to be a Viking cruise.

We were so well taken care of by everyone who worked on the ship, I have no interest in checking out any other cruise lines.

As I recall it, I had almost nothing to do with planning this trip.  I steered clear of arranging the details--e.g., choosing which excursions to undertake at which stops.  I didn't want to get emotionally invested, in case something caused us to cancel or postpone again. 

As Mecca remembers it, I was involved in every decision on every detail.

I did initially co-decide to undertake a Mediterranean voyage and to travel with Viking.  Many cruise lines go to the Mediterranean.  But there's only one Viking.

Sunrise on the way to Naples

Naples 

The best thing about Naples was the sunrise on the way there.

Port of Naples

Castel Nuovo, a medieval castle, now home to the Neapolitan Society of Homeland History

We walked into the city from the ship.  I had researched fountain pen shops that were located there and the closest one to the ship was The Beauty of Paperwork, 1 mile away.  I had an address and I had Google Maps on my phone.  And when we arrived in the vicinity of the address, we couldn't find the pen shop, couldn't find the address on any storefront.  We looked and looked and looked again.  We went into hundred-year-old buildings, up old-fashioned elevators that looked like cages where I had to open and close the elevator doors by hand.  One side of the street and then the other.  The Google Maps marker seemed at one point to indicate the pen shop was inside a produce market.  It was a wild goose chase.  We spent 3 hours on it.  We never found the store.

Sicily

The road our bus climbed to get to the start of our Sicily excursion

On the island of Sicily, high in the hills above Messina, Francis Ford Coppola found the rustic village of Savoca and planted Hollywood's flag there.  He used Savoca to film all the Sicily scenes in The Godfather, The Godfather II, and The Godfather III.

Bar Vitelli is where Michael Corleone asks Appolonia's father for her hand in marriage.  It is also the place where I ate the best gelato I had on the trip.

Chiesa di San Nicola, the church where Michael and Appolonia get married

Metal sculpture of Francis Ford Coppola across from Bar Vitelli

Malta 

Triton Fountain

The Valletta Waterfront Building provided our view from the ship.  Zoom in to see the defensive wall behind the building.  Every port we stopped at in the Mediterranean was heavily defended with fortifications, mostly still intact, that have been there for 2,000-8,000 years.

Nighttime view

With a colorful parade of floats, Malta celebrated Carnival while we were there.

Typical street scene in Valletta

Mediterranean Sea

The reading material I brought on the trip

Corfu

Port of Corfu

Ionian Sea on the west side of Corfu

Fellow devotees of afternoon cappuccino

Mecca's Fall

We had taken a tour bus from the ship on the east coast of Corfu to Paleokatristsa Monestery on the west coast.  After that, the tour guide took us on a walk through modern Corfu.  At the end of the walking tour we were invited to walk around on our own and take a shuttle bus back to the ship. So we walked around on our own and took a shuttle bus back to the ship.  

When we arrived at the shuttle bus we boarded through the front door. The center aisle was dark because the sun was behind clouds and darker still toward the rear of the bus because the side-rear door was not open to let in what little ambient light there was.  As we made our way toward the rear, passing the steps of the rear-side door, Mecca inadvertently put her left foot on the edge of the top step that she couldn't quite see and she fell down into the black hole that comprised the dark steps and the closed door.  She was down there in pain and absolutely stuck because she had no way to get her feet under her and so no way to extricate herself.  I wanted to call MacGyver but he was fictional.  Eventually it was decided to open the door she was leaning against and have a handful of strongbacks catch her when she fell out.  That was how it was done.

Unfortunately, for the rest of the trip she was in constant pain, and every day the pain was worse than the day before.  Fortunately, she broke no bones, didn't tear any muscles or tendons or ligaments, didn't suffer a concussion.

Olympia

We are about to enter sacred real estate, equal to the Acropolis and the Parthenon.  This is where the spiritual journey began for me on this trip.  This is ancient Olympia.

 

Seating for Olympians during opening ceremonies

Olympic pageantry and ceremony are traditions that go back nearly 3,000 years. As the athletes walked to the stadium they paraded through a colonnade and paid tribute to Nike as they passed her statue on their left.  Nike is the Greek goddess of victory.

The statue of Nike stood atop this column

After walking through the colonnade, the athletes, coaches, and judges would enter the Olympic stadium through this arch.

Site of the Olympic Stadium

The ancient Greeks conducted their Olympics nearly 300 times―right here, every 4 years without fail, from 776 B.C.E to 393 C.E.

 
Kálamata

This is where the famous Kálamata olives come from.  We didn't see any.  We didn't even look.  It never occurred to us to look because we didn't know about the olives until we heard someone mention them on a cooking show, after we got home from the trip. 

We visited two castles in Kálamata, Greece.  The first was Pylos Castle.

 

The pink object in the lower right quadrant is Mecca, waiting for me to leave the upper level. The combined effect of her multiple sclerosis and that fall on the bus made the steep steps here impossible to attempt.

 

The second castle was Methini Castle.  Mecca went to this one.  I didn't.  I stayed in town and hung out with the cats.

Free-Roaming Cats and Dogs

We encountered free-roaming cats and dogs everywhere we went in the Mediterranean. They might technically have been feral.  But I've interacted with feral cats.  And the interaction goes like this: I look at them, they run away.

These animals were not just friendly but openly friendly.  I was at one site, sitting on a pile of flat rocks as if on a chair, and I felt this push from behind on my upper back near my left shoulder.  I thought, aw, that feels just like a cat rubbing its whiskers against me, and instantly I wished it really were a cat.  It was. 

 

Crete 

The Hammurabi Code is the oldest codified law in the world.  Roughly 3,500 years ago, King Hammurabi of Babylonia received the law from, or so the story goes, the Babylonian god of justice Shamesh.

 

The Minoans lived on the island of Crete 3,000-3,500 years ago. They were the first civilization in Europe and were social and political ancestors of the Greeks.

The Minoans obtained a copy of the Hammurabi Code in its original Akkadian language, translated and transliterated it into early Greek, and finally carved the code into these stone blocks.

The Hammurabi Code carved into these stone blocks constituted the first codified law in Europe.

Seating for civic meetings

Rhodes

Every Mediterranean city and country we visited had fortifications that have survived since ancient times.  But Rhodes went berserk.

This is a closeup of our view from the ship

This car rental agency occupies  a portion of the battlement

The walk into the city was lined with these battlements. The obelisk on the right in the far distance is at the edge of the city.

Zoom in to see the fortifications on the other side of the inlet.

The City of Rhodes is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  And the ghost of one feature still towers above the others. The Colossus of Rhodes was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  It was a giant bronze statue with legs and feet that bestrode the entrance to the harbor.  Now, two deer, each one perched on a column, indicate the locations of where the feet and legs of the Colossus used to be. The closest deer is a doe. The farthest is a stag, marked with an arrow in the photo below.

While we walked around Rhodes we spotted a restaurant and decided to go get cappuccino.  I also looked at the breakfast menu and saw something that reminded me of a mind-boggling phenomenon: Europeans are nuts about Nutella.  On the menu was a Belgian waffle covered with Nutella and topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Ephesus, Turkey

Ephesus (EFF-uh-sus) was one of the places St. Paul visited late in his life.  Sometime afterward, he wrote a letter, an "epistle," to the inhabitants.  You can find it in the Holy Bible.  It's the book of Ephesians.

In the time of St. Paul, Ephesus was a Greek outpost.  Over a thousand years later, the Ottoman Turks took it for themselves.  Modern Turkey has not offered to give it back.

The earliest inhabitants arrived there about 8,000 years ago.

In 2015, Ephesus was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Gates of Augustus

The Temple of Hadrian

The Library of Celsius, one of the largest libraries in the ancient world.

Stadium seating at the Theatre of Ephesus

Mosaic tile floor

Public toilet with room for 9 people in this row and 4 more around the corner

The imprisonment of St Paul on Ephesus occured in a structure, now gone, at the top of this hill.

Corinth

Yes, yes, yes.  Corinth was where the Corinthians lived.

Apart from being a place St. Paul visited and wrote an "epistle" to, Corinth plays a pivotal role in the story of Oedipus.

Oedipus lived in Corinth with his parents.  When he was a young man he traveled to a distant city to attend a party.  While there he overheard a conversation in which one particpant said Oedipus had been adopted.  This disturbed Oedipus so much he abruptly left the party for home but first stopped at the Temple of Apollo to get the truth.

Oedipus asked the god whether he had been adopted.  But instead of answering the question, Apollo foretold that the young man would kill his father and marry his mother.  Horrified, Oedipus decided not to return to his parents in Corinth but changed course and set out for Thebes.

On the way he found himself on a narrow mountain pass.  Coming toward him from the opposite direction was a carriage with two men standing on the outside of it, plus the driver, and one within.  The driver found he could not get around Oedipus and remain on the road.  The passenger ordered the men to throw the obstacle off the mountain.  Instead, Oedipus threw the men off one by one.  The passenger leaned out of the carriage window and tried to beat Oedipus with his cane.  Oedipus disarmed the man, beat him soundly, and threw him off the mountain too.  He then continued his walk to Thebes.

When he arrived he learned that the sphinx had put a curse on the city which was now under siege by a series of catastrophes.  The sphinx offered Thebans a way out. Solve this riddle and I'll remove the curse.  Here was the riddle: What goes on four legs, then on two, then on three?  Oedipus thought and then answered "man."  As a baby he crawls on all four, then walks upright unaided till old age forces him to use a cane.  That was the correct answer.

The curse was lifted and Oedipus was a hero.  The townspeople said that a month earlier their king had left town and not returned.  They assumed something dreadful must have happened and he wouldn't be returning.  So they proclaimed their hero the new king.  The queen, the castle, and the realm were his now.

A few years later, the sphinx and its curse were back.  By this time, Oedipus was popular and well-established as king, happily married to his queen and proud of their three children.  But the sphinx reported that the curse would remain until the murderer among them had been discovered and brought to justice.  This man had murdered their king!

This has already been a long story so I'll cut to the chase.  An old man stepped forward and relayed a story he had heard and partially witnessed a long time ago.  The king and queen had just had a son, but the king didn't want the child and ordered a henchman to take him out into the forest and kill him.

The henchman laid the child down far away from the castle and then nailed the child's ankles to a heavy tree branch.  He couldn't kill the child but wouldn't free him either.  He just walked away.

The old man previously mentioned came upon the helpless child, removed the branch and nails, and thus freed him.  The old man knew a married couple who had been trying to have a child but couldn't.  He gave the baby to the couple and they raised him to adulthood.  Recognizing the scars on the grown man's ankles the old man shouted, "That abandoned boy is now your king!"

Another man stepped forward.  He had been one of the henchmen on the carriage that had met Oedipus on the road, but he had fallen off and hidden behind a large bush before the mayhem started.  Nevertheless, he saw the whole thing.  "The man who killed your king is this man," and pointed to Oedipus.  Everyone understood the implications.

Apollo's prophesy had come true: Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother.  The queen ran into the castle and killed herself before Oedipus could stop her.  He then found a long needle (like today's knitting needles) and stabbed his eyes until he was blind.  He was then arrested and jailed.

For those unfamiliar with ancient Greek tales, Corinth is mostly known for the Corinth Canal.  Ancient Romans conceived the canal during the Empire.  They planned to cut it through the Isthmus of Corinth, which separates the Peloponnese from mainland Greece.

The ancients only partially built their canal.  The Emperor Nero used 6,000 prisoners of various Roman wars as laborers.  But they only made progress one-tenth of the way across the isthmus.  Today, no remnants of the original canal remain.

Between then and the 19th century there had been several plans to finish the job or rebuild a canal from scratch.  For a variety of reasons, these attempts never got further than the idea stage.  Finally it was built between 1882 C.E. to 1891 C.E.

Corinth Canal

Denouement

Departure day was the day after Corinth.  We disembarked from the Viking Star at 4:00 AM Central European Time for the bus ride to Athens International Airport.  Our plane took off for Zurich at 6:35 AM.  We took off from Zurich at 12:25PM Central European Time.  From Zurich to LAX was a 10-hour flight.  That's 10 hours in real time.  LAX to Sacramento allowed a brief nap.  We arrived home at bedtime.

Mecca is fully recovered from her fall inside the tour bus.