Indoor Glories

 It's not that I stop hiking in the winter.  It's just that my life gets crazy busy, busier than most, at Christmastime.  It has to do with the line of work I'm in.  One of the [few] advantages to living in an urban area is that there are indoor glories to visit when all the free time you get is a few stolen hours here and there, and not enough time to immerse yourself in a sylvan trek.  This is the foyer of the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh.  It's attached to our big museum complex and appeared in the movie "Flashdance."

A day alone at the museums is always nice, even if it's not a real substitute for the forest.  It was especially cool to see the Hall of Sculpture entirely devoid of lame traveling exhibits and elementary school groups.  This is the kind of room where you could spend a long moment.

 One thing to love about Pittsburgh is that its florid, old fashioned architectural details are similar to a forest.  There are always things of beauty waiting to catch the eye.  Most people never notice them.  Just look at the rich detail in this marble door frame.  It's inlaid with a thistle pattern, no doubt to represent the Scottish heritage of the city's wealthiest and most philanthropic families, like the long-ago Carnegies, and Mellons, and Fricks, and Beattys.

 Of course, philanthropy is very often a thinly-disguised attempt to repurchase one's own conscience (and perhaps soul) for ruthless and selfish business practices.  The steel mills used to publish their lists of dead workers every week.  These glories are constructed on their graves, figuratively.  Isn't that always the case with human-made glory?   Versailles.  The pyramids.  The cathedrals of Europe.  All of these are mortared with the blood of the poor.  Ah, but just look at the lovely tiling on this floor.  What kind of a geometrist came up with this design, hacked out of pure marble? 

This room looked a lot different in the 1970s, when I was a kid.  It used to have faded watery-colored murals of oceanic scenes from the earliest prehistory of the earth.  Scared the living hell out of me.  Sometimes I'm glad to be back in Pittsburgh.  It's nice to be in a place where some of my earliest memories were formed.  I'm glad to have lived out West, and in suburban New York City, and half a decade in Africa.  I feel like an old Englishman who lived his life in the far-off, exotic reaches of the Empire, only to return to a little brick rowhouse in the Midlands, settling into his memories and tea at 4:00.  (Okay, the analogy breaks down with the Midlands, and the rowhouse, and the tea, but you get the drift...)