Dark dark Prag

When Milos Forman shot Amadeus he did it in Prague because, he said, "Communist inefficiency" had left the city as it was in the 18th century. It's also one of the best to survive WWII thanks to an epic defeat of the Nazis by Prague citizens and a deal they made not to drown the bastards if they left without damaging the beloved city. How to describe Prague?

It never lets you go, said Kafka, "this dear little mother has sharp claws." For Wagner, its beauty "left an impression...that will never fade". For Rodin, "the women of Prague, the way they walk and the way they are attired, so graceful and elegant, reminded me of Dante’s Paradise".

For me, it's a place best visited in the rain. The architectural splendor of Prague reaches the limits of beauty, but like Amsterdam this beauty comes with a sordid past. The darkness of the Jewish ghetto. Don Giovanni. Mucha. Kafka. Dvořák. Smetana. Freud. Husserl. Stoppard. Such exquisitely painful, frighteningly beautiful minds. What can one possibly say?

Nothing new comes from Prague now. Nothing I know of. Its buildings, its past, its music, are all untouchably lovely but utterly done. Prague is the world's prettiest museum, but who wants to live in a museum? No trip to Europe can possibly be complete without seeing a place as profoundly eye-opening and heart-rending as this is, but it isn't a place for a home. Not for me.

I went to this introductory program before my freshman year of uni and on the trip they took us to Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and had us sit by a river and listen to Smetana's Moldau and then guess what it was about. I was the only one who figured it was about a river, but I'd never have guessed about the fairies and the hunters. It all sounded so sad to me. Seeing Prague, I get why. Even in a world of wonder, as Prague is, life is suffused with pain.