"This landscape I'm looking out onto is totally manmade, but I feel like it does a fabulous job at inspiring the beautiful and allowing it to thrive. It may have once been more apparent that this place is totally fabricated, but over the years and generations the land has reclaimed much of its own, growing into a mesh of the two kinds— natural and manmade— a whole new beast.
"I'm even now sitting on the steps of the temple of Apollo, a constructed granite column edifice not for the gods but simply for the beauty of Roman looks and a display or “shoutout” to the Roman culture. Likewise there is a constructed grotto (beautiful!) with statues of a river nymph and Neptune, the water god. Again, tributes to Rome and Greece, planted long after the actual people who worshiped these beings ceased to walk the earth. But yet they are beautiful and mystical and they please and entice the eye. I know they are fakes, but cannot help enjoying looking at them nevertheless.
"I gain such great peace from sitting in nature— contemplating these things. I feel that this trip has allowed me to experience life and many new things/situations, allowing me to fully understand (or at least better) myself— my likes, dislikes, my opinions. It has been a blessing, though sometimes a hard blessing to experience mentally and emotionally; turbulence is how we learn; without friction we would never get anywhere!”
The three paragraphs above are a direct excerpt from my journal. I wrote that as I sat in the temple that overlooked the ground at Stourhead Gardens. That temple features in the new, short version of Pride and Prejudice, in the scene where Darcy first asks Elizabeth to marry him and she refuses, and it's raining and sad and so dramatic! We took a lot of pictures up there, trying to look like Keira Knightly did in the movie, but I'm sure we all failed to reach the perfection Hollywood cameras achieve.
After visiting Stourhead gardens, we drove to Stonehenge. If I could say one thing about Stonehenge it is that I really liked it. Yeah, it was a rip off paying seven pounds to get in just to see the thing close up, and yeah, there were like a million people all walking around, taking pictures like mad, but at the end of the day, I spent about twenty minutes sketching it and, like nothing else does in the world, sketching something makes you either love it or hate it. I really enjoyed just looking at the stones and sketching them. It was fun. Maybe I liked it more because I had had a hard time sketching anything worth even looking at the day before, so my success with Stonehenge (I guess anyone can sketch some rocks though... hmm), made me feel better about myself or something.
It was definitely an experience, and I had almost as much fun in the gift shop afterwords as I did while I was out there looking at it. PS, it was a lot smaller than I expected it, but after staring at it for a while, I realized that the reason it seemed smaller to me was because in all the pictures, the camera somehow makes the stones appear more spread out, forming a circle with a larger circumference. However, in real life, the stones are all squashed together more, pretty close together without such huge gaps between each stone and the next. They were pretty big though, probably 15 or 17 feet tall, I don't think they went up to twenty feet, but maybe. Cool to think that people could move such massive stones into positions like that with just ropes and horses.
After going to Stonehenge, we drove to Jane Austen's house in the city of Chaucer. It was really fun to take a tour of the house and there were a bunch of old ladies inside ready to answer any questions we had about the house or the authoress. It was very fun, probably even more so because we were a group of 40 girls and going to visit Jane Austen's house is just such a girly thing to do.
Well, after the house, we drove another hour and a half back to London. And that was the end of our Southwestern trip! And our next big trip is Paris! Then we have three more small trips- two overnighters and one day we go to the Temple. And then I'm home. The end of this trip marked the half-way point of the semester. Halfway there. We've already done so much, but at the same time, there is so much we aren't seeing- that we have missed. I guess it's just a good excuse to come back, eh?
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