We haven't seen the last hot day of this summer but still, it seems like we've 'broken the back' of summer. A camper has a right to celebrate that. I am even happy about a smoky sky (from the forest fires) because it takes the edge off the hot sun. Smoke bothers some people but I can even stand bicycling in it.
So off we went, onto a new road and perhaps a scenic view from the continental divide. The trees were thick and unburned, so the shade was nice. But the view-scape was pretty closed in. After a while, it seemed like something was about to change.
The dirt road got closer to an almost cliff-like mountain edge, so the view opened up, with each curve seeming to hang further and further out into space, as if swelling into a type of crescendo.
By sheer dumb luck, I had happened to watch this video on You Tube the previous day, and the music was still stuck in my head:
It was the "Love Death" from the climax to Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde," sung by Waltraud Meier. Not only did the music fit the setting, but the smoky sky was a type of 'death' to the viewscape.
An analogy loses its charm or excitement if a person tries to labor it into exactness. It is better to let it be an approximation, and use it as a mind-expanding tool that takes you from the real and immediate... off onto some grander and more permanent thing. How Plato would have approved of the excitement that goes with visualizing the true reality of a thing -- that is, the Idea it represents!
Regardless of whether we have reached the thermal 'high-water' level of this summer, I certainly reached it esthetically.
This shows how a traveler can make a outdoor experience more powerful: by not just focusing on one thing, such as the height of the mountain or the redness of the arch; but rather by choosing to combine scenery, risk or uncertainty, physical exercise or hardship, companionship of their doggie, surprise and spontaneity, and ideas from books and music.
In doing so, the traveler constructs their own small version of what Wagner would have called gesamtKunstWerk, a total work of art.
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