My aunt is tiny and upright, and bright and bossy. She knows Berlin like the back of her hand and she will go anywhere.
‘Das werde ich mir gerne ansehen,’ is her guiding principle. ‘I’d like to take a look.’
Yesterday, she and I went to a free concert at the Berlin Philharmonie, meandered from there through the doors of St. Matthäus church into a compelling exhibition of work by Ralf Ziervogel (if you’re only going to click one link in this letter, make it this one — even if only to witness a different way for a website to work, but also to get a glimpse into the detail of his drawings), and across the way to the Neue Nationalgalerie, which was exhibiting the work of an artist called Monica Bonvicini. It was my first experience of being inside a Mies van der Rohe building, and therefore thrilling. My attention was too much on the building to give Bonvicini’s ‘I do You’ work much more than passing puzzlement.
Then we wandered here and there, took this and that bus, went up and down escalators, took shortcuts, and casually covered ten kilometres in companionable conversation and silence both.
I observe this aunt of mine with as much – perhaps more – curiosity than the glorious bounty of this city. How am I like her and how am I different, and how does where and when I became an adult account for those differences? Close family is too close to really see. Geographically distant family is observable in ways neither close family nor acquaintances can ever be.
On the first page of the first small notebook of my year away, I made note of something the French author André Gide said:
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
I wrote it before I left, as a way to comfort myself in case I got homesick, but because I see and read it so often, its meaning has expanded.
If the shore is the self, and not your homeland, then I have noticed that it’s possible to travel with the shore always in sight, but always changing. And in the short time I have been away from my settled life in Cape Town, I feel like the foreign lands I’m seeing are those that exist internally.
This is not a new idea – what else is travel if not various degrees of conscious and unconscious self-discovery? – but what surprises me is how aware I am of the changes.
When my child body began to adjust itself towards adulthood, it was like my bones were growing and intruding painfully into the surrounding flesh that could not yet accommodate the bigger bones – as though each physical part had to accommodate and respond, lead and follow, as different parts of the physical body were burgeoning.
Since I landed in Berlin, I feel like this is happening to me again, though not in my body.
It is a surprise when you realise that you think of yourself as expansive, progressive and flexible, and then find there are things about you that are small and tight and fearful.
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