The blog less taken.

Still a nasty day, but the sidewalks and streets were just dry enough for me to walk to the train station and back home. The snow should all be gone tomorrow or the next day. But it’s an odd thing for the moment, green grass sticking through the snow like chia.

My brother Jay wrote (a while ago, after I discussed seeing the Gothic-style Second Pres in Indianapolis): “Let me know if you do get inside the Second Presbyterian Church. Have you seen the chapel at Duke University? All of the original west campus at Duke, most notably the chapel, is in the Gothic taste. [Jay went to Duke Law School.]

“It was all built in the late ’20s and early ’30s, after the Duke family bought Trinity College. (The east campus, originally the women's college, is Georgian. I believe that was the style of the original Trinity College.) The Gothic architecture is most persuasive in the colder months, especially when the sky is overcast. That gives the place something of the feel of northern Europe, with the gray stones, especially when wet, matching the sky. In the spring, after it begins to get warm and sticky, and the dogwoods are in flower, it looks a bit out of place.

“The chapel itself is as big as a cathedral but I don't believe that it's patterned on any specific building. I found it interesting that there are niches carved inside and out for saints but not a saint standing in any of them, as though they'd all stepped outside for a smoke. (Cigarettes were one of the sources of the money that built the place.)

“There are, however, statues around the main entrance. Above the main doorway there's John Wesley and other Methodist figures a handy Web site has just identified for me as Thomas Coke, Francis Asbury and Thomas Whitefield. Duke is or was technically a Methodist institution, though Methodists were fairly thin on the ground when I was there.

“There are also six statues above and flanking the main entrance, three religious figures on one side and three secular heroes on the other: Girolamo Savanarola, John Wycliff & Martin Luther, and Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee & Sidney Lanier. If the idea behind the religious figures is that they had something to do with the Reformation — with Wycliff and Savanarola, presumably, as proto-reformers — I think the choice of Savonarola is a bit shaky. I'm not sure about the secular figures; all Southern heroes I suppose. The chapel has a crypt, too, which I recall as being closed to the public. Several of the Duke family are buried there. As far as I know, there are no relics, not even a lock of Wesley's hair.”

Sounds like a fine thing to see. I missed it. At least I think I did. I visited Duke one afternoon in March 1981, when I was on spring break in North Carolina. I remember the sprawl of Duke’s campus, the large green spaces and many trees among the academic buildings. I played frisbee with my traveling partners, Neal and Stuart. Spring break had just begun for us; it was a warm, sunny day; unwrapped girls were out and about. No wonder we didn’t have any interest in a Gothic chapel. Even if I did see it, the memory didn’t stick.

I can think of a number of other things I’ve missed, things in the vicinity of wherever I was — and which I would have made time for, had I known about them. For example, I’ve long been fond of “Sitting Woman with Legs Drawn Up,” one of the last paintings of the doomed Egon Schiele, who died in the influenza of 1918. It hangs in Prague, and I was in that city for about 10 days. But I didn’t know it was there, so I didn’t seek it out. Also, there have been other sites I’ve blown off consciously, such as P’anmunjom, because I was too tired for the excursion. So it goes. It's a maxim of travel: you can't see everything, even everything in the neighborhood.

Then there’s the issue of memory, that trickster. Late last year I picked up the diary I kept in the summer of 1983 and decided to read it cover to cover. I’d looked at it from time to time, of course, but never so closely. It is a travel diary, mostly my first trip to Europe, but also includes accounts of time spent in Tennessee, Alabama, Texas and New York, just before and after my graduation from college. It was a fine time, of course, and I remember a lot of it. But the remarkable thing is how much of it I have no memory of whatsoever — and not even a written account can raise a memory from the catacombs of my mind. So much for the idea that writing everything down will necessarily help you remember.

For instance, in early June that year I was in Cambridge, England, and apparently spent an evening listening to a New Orleans-style jazz band at a local nightclub. You’d think you would remember something as incongruous as that, but no. I read it and thought, “I did that?” Then there was my description of taking an evening walk in West Berlin in July, where I happened across a marvelously lit shopping plaza — colorful and alive with light, without being gaudy in the way such places often are (e.g., a casino in Las Vegas). Do I remember this now? No, I can’t picture it.