A memorial in the Powazkowski cemetery

This cemetery, a block from my Warsaw hotel (the Hotel Maria), is one of Warsaw's oldest & largest, & contains the graves of some of Poland's famous artists, etc. During WWII & the Warsaw uprising, battles were fought within the cemetery.

This memorial, on the grave of Jerzie Kolanowski, is an appropriate memorial to end this year's blog on: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi -- Thus passes the glory of the world.

My trip is more than a week behind me, already, and has taken on something of the flavor of a dream, remembered not in detail but in disconnected bits, which somehow are supposed to make up a meaningful narrative. But as I try to piece those bits together into that narrative, it all crumbles apart, like an ancient artifact recently dug up out of the ground.

I suppose there is no meaning outside the doing. On the Aga Zaryan CD I bought in Torun -- she's this really sultry jazz singer, a Warsawian but she croons seductively in an accent-free American idiom -- on the cover of her CD is this:

"The world is not something to look at, it is something to be in."

And, that world whether we look at it or be in it, is soon gone. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

But what glory, eh?!