Reflections On Monet's Views Of The Grand Canal

In my researches for the ideas in Sebastian Smee's book I have been consulting art exhibition catalogues, most recently some displaying Monet's Mediterranean scenes.  I lingered over his paintings of the Grand Canal in Venice painted at different hours of the day and thus showing various hues, the canal, the adjacent palazzi and churches, all manner of Venetian city scenes, and quite unconsciously I was able to place myself quite exactly into the locale.  The same was true at Antibes, and Juan des Pins, and all sorts of places he painted. And it came to me how lucky I was in this and in many other ways: that I knew intimately and instinctively my way around some of the most beautiful cities in the world.  True of Venice, true of Rome, of course, of Paris, and London, I could go on and on.  These are places that I have traced into my memory forever, or so I believe.  When I was young and Europe was being bombarded into oblivion, my mother, who carried on a daily breakfast conversation with us children about the progress of the war, was forever lamenting over the eventual disappearance of everything beautiful in this world (she did not include natural wonders like the Grand Tetons or the Grand Canyon, nor indeed any city in the Western Hemisphere).  Impressionable child that I was I grieved along with her.  When the war ended, and I became an adult, my obligations first as a student, then a husband, then a father kept me on these shores, but with clenched teeth I mimicked Scarlett's memorable scene of resolve when she cries out "As God is my witness, I shall never go hungry again!" Only I was resolving come what may I would get to Europe.  And I did and with an intensity and persistence that brought me back so many times, sometimes for the summer, sometimes on sabbatical for year or more.  I traveled and bore into my surroundings, made them mine, drank deeply, smelled the atmosphere.  Perhaps I have no idea of how to get from Point A to Point B in San Francisco, or Los Angeles, or Chicago or New York, or where really I should be going to find something attractive.  But the great European cities, ah, yes, they are mine, now in my memory, I doubt that I shall see them again otherwise.