View from the Pier

So divinely is the world organized that every one of us,
in our place and time,
is in balance with everything else.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832

This image was taken in Amoudi Bay on the Greek island of Santorini.  This sheltered cove lies below the island’s western most village of Oia (pronounced Ia) and is reached by a steep set of 300 steps carved into the cliff face.  My husband Tom and I descended from the white-washed village down along a layer of volcanic rock in shades of deep, rich red, the color of devil’s-food cake, to the port at the bottom, where another cluster of gleaming white buildings huddled along the brilliant turquoise rim of the Aegean Sea. 

At the far end of this small harbor is a string of tiny seafood tavernas that each could seat about a dozen people—this shot was taken from the last in the line, where we ate a late lunch.  To reach it, we edged along a narrow sidewalk atop a sea wall wedged between the establishments and the gently lapping waves.  We skirted a group of small, tanned boys, dripping wet after just climbing out of the water.  We stepped over silver pails filled with shrimp and shellfish kept fresh in seawater until hungry customers like us came along.  

After eating, we allowed ourselves to just sit in the sun and take in the view in front of us, sated and content.  We were struck by the serendipity of the scene’s palette–combinations of yellow, red and blue echoed over and over again.  Seemingly random and disconnected objects within our sightline were all somehow color coordinated–from the brightly-patterned table cloths to the vibrantly-painted boats, to even the sunny hue of the buoys.  Noticing this gave us the sensation Goethe spoke of in the quote above, of alignment and synchronicity, that all was in its place, including, presumably, us. 

German writer Goethe is credited with originating the concept of “world literature,” and is considered one of the most important thinkers in Western culture.  An early “Renaissance man” who was an authority on many subjects, he was the author of a scientific study of color.   To my decidedly unscientific mind, it appears the upshot of his thesis is that color is experiential and a matter of perception, rather than a matter of waves and particles. 

Goethe was also an early proponent of Sturm and Drang, a movement in literature and music in the late 1700s that translates into “storm and urge.”  The guiding force behind the ideology is the importance of individual, subjective perspective and a wide range of emotion.  Sturm and Drang flourished in the years following the Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on analysis and the faculty of reason.

Faced with the drudgery of a long, slow haul on full stomachs back up to Oia, we opted for exercising reason instead of our hamstrings.   We headed to the outer edges of the village and the bottom of the curving road that snaked up the mountainside and stuck out our thumbs as the first car approached.  The young woman driving screeched to a stop within inches of us, waved a welcome into her small car with one hand, and with the other, flicked the ash from her cigarette, as she continued to sing along at top volume to the pulsing Euro beat blaring from her radio.  As soon as we climbed in, she aggressively shifted gears and tore off, whipping around corners unprotected by guardrails and involving precipitous drops.  All the while, our Good Samaritan wailed along with the singer emoting through the speakers, both of them evidently fans of sturm and drang.  

We lived to tell the tale and our ascent took minutes instead of hours, but the hairpin turns at breakneck speed sent my adrenal gland into overdrive, thus temporarily rocking my divinely organized world.  So much for reason!

For more images from Greece, see Travel Photos or Store.    

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