Horror Vacui

I don’t remember when I first learned the term horror vacui, but it has either been in art class or in the high school class lovingly referred to as ancient nonsense, which included reading the Iliad and learning to recognize Ionic from Corinthian columns.  (That I can still recite the first lines of the 15,000 lines or so long story speaks to the power of putting words into rhythmic form.)

Wikipedia tells me:

“In visual art, horror vacui (Latin for ‘fear of empty space’) is a phenomenon in which the entire surface of a space or an artwork is filled with detail and content, leaving as little perceived emptiness as possible. It relates to the antiquated physical idea, horror vacui, proposed by Aristotle who held that ‘nature abhors an empty space’.”

I was thinking of this as I was awake early and listened to – absolutely nothing.  For whatever reason – probably because it had been uncommonly hot and humid the day before – the window was closed to keep the heat out.  The slightly cooler night prior I had listened to absolutely nothing with a faint addition of waves crashing on the shore, 600 feet away as the heron flies – until around 5:30 a.m. when the da’dum-da’dum of the first local train told me dawn was fast approaching.  Now I am worried my hearing is going as, surely, more birds would have been around to greet the sunrise.

Jetlag is a pain in you-know-where.  Being back in the ole country, nine-hours’ time difference from California, our bodies had a hard time figuring out when to be hungry and when to sleep.  The lack of sleep on a 11 hour red-eye flight added to the confusion.  But as we had done this trip before, we knew that we were useless for the first week and consequently we had planned on not doing much.  We walked on the beach, picked blackberries and wild plums.  I rescued roses and rhododendrons from the ever-invasive strangler vines and enjoyed when the local red deer family graced us with their presence for a feast on the “salad bowl” resulting from this effort.

We had plenty of opportunities for activities:  bikes are in the shed and the forest is just a mile up the road.  We could drive to scores of tourist attractions within an hours’ distance.  Hamlet’s castle is only 30 miles away in Elsinore – which is worth the visit with its quaint narrow streets (and excellent ice cream) even if nobody wants to visit with the ghosts of the late court.

When our children were young and we were their source for teaching Danish history and culture, we have visited many of the places tourists go.  We were not the only source, though:  when they learned about Vikings in middle school, the class was shown a movie of the new Viking ships built the ancient way so researchers could learn how these vessels fared on open sea.  And suddenly their grandparents’ house could be seen on the shore next to the Viking Ship Museum in the old capital of Roskilde, with a grand view to the Cathedral where all kings and queens have been buried for the last 800 years.  This part of history the kids have down pat after way more visits than ordinary “touristing” would warrant.

We did have an appointment in Roskilde, though: we were meeting up with a man from India to visit my great-great-grandparents’ gravesite and see where they lived after they lived in India for a decade.  And, naturally, plenty of visiting with living family got into the calendar as well.

Yet, quiet can be a tourist attraction all by itself.  People and the land are our attractions.  Being on the ground where the magnetic field matches our birth place, and the constellations are familiar.  Are we really that different from the migrating birds or Monarch butterflies as we are wont to believe?  One night the Big Dipper hung huge in the sky just outside the window; it took up the whole horizon.  The night sky was so black you could see the Milky Way with the naked eye.  I don’t mind being awake at night when I have the Dipper, Mizar, and Stella Polaris for company, and I don’t feel guilty over not being energetic during the days when I haven’t slept for more than four hours the night before.

I guess this musing is really about the horror vacui many seem to have about the blank spaces in their calendars.  Vacation and vacui have the same root:

“From Latin vacationem (nominative vacatio) “leisure, freedom, exemption, a being free from duty, immunity earned by service,” noun of state from past-participle stem of vacare “be empty, free, or at leisure.” –

The word vacuum comes from Latin ‘an empty space, void’, noun use of neuter of vacuus, meaning “empty”, related to vacare, meaning “to be empty.”

So why is it that I get asked again and again what we have been Doing for our vacation?  I have been resetting my nervous system from the sensory overload it suffers the rest of the year.  How do you spend your vacation time – if you have any?

Sometimes Being is enough.