At the end of the summer traveling and teaching, I finally have some time to reflect on the experience. This is good, in that I have also asked my students to do the same. One way to start is by looking back on two significant events during the time spent abroad. For me, the two most important moments were solitary ones. I had spent so much time teaching, talking, and explaining that these quiet moments alone stand out. One was bright midday on an external stairway of the Great Wall at Mutianyu outside Beijing. The other was dusk in the space between the Louvre and Place du Carousel in Paris. There are a number of reasons for this I believe. The first is that the spirit, the feel of an historical place is revealed in those rare moments when it confronts you alone. The only sounds are those of wind, trees, the crunching of gravel under foot, and the light is primarily from the sun. Second, it is in isolation and quiet that one can open one's historical imagination, to see the place as it must have been at other times, to feel the presence of those who have stood in that space before.
On the Great Wall at Mutianyu there is a small portal that leads to an external staircase. One can see the wall up close,as it were, from the outside. It was a very warm June day, cloudless and hazy. 
There were very few people there that day, and long moments could be spent alone on top of the wall. Certainly, on the outer side, one's isolation was even more complete. And there the wall revealed itself as more than ancient barrier or tourist destination. It was massive. The stones that underlay the path and battlements on top were revealed: thousands of them, 2 meters long, 1/2 meter thick, perched high atop a ridge that must have required immense effort to put in place. In those stones lay the labor of countless men, and the remains of their lives stretched before and after in my imagination. The wall stood as made, as crafted, as produced, much more so than the usual vistas that almost make of it a natural eruption from the hills, a kind of spine laid bare. Instead, I could see in detail how it had to be put in place, every stone, every opening, every stair. The stones of the wall revealed not only the workers who placed them, but those who fed and supported them, who organized and drove them. They spoke in their mass of the huge organization of human resources necessary to accomplish such an undertaking. The mass of the wall represented a mass of humanity stretched out over space and time, filling the surrounding hills with camps and roads, smoke and sound.
One late evening in July, after the celebrations of Bastille Day, I was walking back to my apartment in Montmartre from the Pont des Artes on the Seine. It was just dusk; the Louvre gates were closing, the light was dimming, the floodlights had not been lit as of yet. I stood between the arms of the museum facing west towards the Arc du Carousel; the courtyard pyramid was behind me. All I could see were the Louvre, the Arc, and the trees of the Tuileries. All was bathed in a gentle glow from the remains of a cloudless and warm day. Few people were still about and even the traffic sounds from nearby were strangely muted. In a place that often is swarming with humanity, it was rather still and lonely. One could imagine days when this was secluded royal terrain, closed off to all but a few, a privileged sanctuary rather than a public park. The power required to seal off such a space in the heart of a major city was palpable. The symbolism of authority, once royal, now cultural, isolated from the rest of the city, was clearly evident. And without my memory assistant, i.e. my camera, I stood and etched the view, the sounds, the light, into my mind. It was a fleeting, ephemeral moment, but one that captured the uniqueness of this particular space and reinforced how important the phenomenological experience of place is so crucial to any lasting understanding. It captured the essential necessity of travel, for the contingent, the environment, the gestalt of places cannot be reproduced and experienced from afar. As the cliché goes: "one has to have been there."
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