A Praise to Beauty

Words and photographs

by Willem van den Heever

It’s my first international trip in more than a year. In South Africa, we’ve just entered the 3rd wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with figures at their worst yet, due to the Delta strain that just arrived. The country is about to go into a hard lockdown again with simple privileges like alcohol being banned. Seems like I just made it out in time. The ‘en transit’ journey getting to your destination is not as it used to be anymore. Everything now feels like a stressful burden of anxiety with heaps of paperwork just to get from one airport gate to the next and hoping laws around the pandemic didn’t change in your destination’s country in the last 24 hours.

I do however see traveling and vagabonding as a privilege again and a golden miracle when you do eventually make it through all the red bureaucratic tape and touch down in that foreign country in another hemisphere. But with my arrival in Italy, it’s not just another country with a different culture and history I arrive in (as when previously traveling to new places), but a completely new universe where something like the Coronavirus seems non-existing. No lockdown, no curfew, and very little mask-wearing anywhere.

I unexpectedly spend the night in Milan due to all trains to the coast, better known as the “Italian Riviera”, being sold out until the following afternoon. Again, not because of lowered capacity due to Covid-19 restrictions, but because everyone is rushing to the Mediterranean promised land of salty blue waters and 12-hour long golden sunny days.

I finally make it to the carefree, sun-dazed, Prosecco drenched bubble of euphoria myself, and (although working nine to five during the day while I’m there) I soon can’t help but give in to this magical moment on a timeless timeline which presented itself to me so romantically. And soon, half ashamed, feeling like a man giving into a guilty vice, the hopeless romantic in me fully emerges himself into this roman candlelit idealistic world of beautiful Italian women strolling the cobblestone streets with their black summer dresses, young couples sitting on park benches staring at the ancient golden sunset city while dragging slowly and nonchalantly on a cigarette and timeless pebble beaches lined with sunbathers soaking up the carefree-summer. In idyllic quaint coastal towns, blue heavenly summer skies turn pink as the day greets the lovers kissing on the rocks while spilling their wine. As I wander the sun drenched ancient alleys and cobble sidewalks at night, I think of Dostoevsky’s words; “... In fact, sometimes he (the romantic) almost believes his dream life is no figment of the imagination, no self-deception, no delusion, but something real, actual, existing.”

I spend my time equally divided in the water as outside, and with one deep breath, I dive through the crystal clear waters to the bottom of the sea where body and soul intertwine and become content and free. Even after sunset, the magic aroma of spontaneous Mediterranean summer adventure lingers in the air, with late-night swims and cheap wine and laughter with new foreign acquaintances on monument steps of old ‘piazzas’ while a drunk half South American half Italian man serenades the passers-by. On halcyon, Jean-Luc Godard’s film set beaches, old bronze-brown Italian forefathers and mothers lay sunbathing with wrinkles like laughing smiles of a good, but not always easy life they’ve been through. The men tell long anecdotes to each other while playing chess, while the women lay reading vintage Vogues or the weekly horoscope in the local newspaper. The danger is, it’s easy to fall in love in this movie-like cliché paradisal world when one lover on a spontaneous adventure passes another, forgetting that it’s just another thrill-seeking passerby, stuck in the same heart-break scene at this moment in time.

Yet, even in this tragedy, there is beauty when two restless souls from opposite spheres by some cosmic timing, come together and collide. She appeared like an apparition in this dream; light summer brown hair, wide eyes of dreams and aspirations that make hearts skip, and underneath rosy cheeks, a warm smile that reminds you of a long-forgotten lover from a previous life. The moment is fleeting and like flowers in a vase, will soon wilt away, yet you play your role and play along as if it will never end, as if autumn will never come and the leaves will never turn yellow, fall, and die. You meet and say goodbye between the trains you’re waiting for. It is in these moments that I find enlightenment, when everything and yet nothing all of a sudden makes sense and you realize you are nowhere else but in this exact moment in time, in this here and now, and that’s exactly where you should be.

Reflecting back through the negatives on the cutting room table, I now realize that I shouldn’t just look at these fleeting moments of adventure as an excuse for raconteuring, or a hedonistic escape, but that feasting is as important as fasting in this life. And in a world of tragedy and chaos, that feels like it’s falling apart, there is still time and space for one to just pause for a moment, forget about everything and see the beauty that’s still left in the wasteland - see the little moments of harmony, like the two lovers kissing under a full moon night while the tideless Mediterranean waves caress the rocky shore at their ankles - a praise to beauty. The endless Mediterranean summer, which like all good things, will end, sorrowfully so.