A Visit by Caspar David Friedrich

Huh? Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic painter (1774-1840) (?)  A picture of our garden (?):

The garden of Michael Ampersant and Chang Man Yoon in Alcobaça, PT

 Or not? Not Caspar David? Let's try some more of his pictures:

Abtei im Eichenwald (1810)

Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes (1825-30)

Striking, the artistic similarity, isn't it?  Or not? 

Spoiler alert: the first picture is by Chang Man Yoon, the renowned contemporary photographer.

Yesterday evening

Yesterday

View of the Valais from the Chalet. Picture by Chang

Back in Switzerland

(These are Chang's pictures, of course, all taken yesterday:)

Fragment, fragment: Well, we used it before, but here we go again; it's from our as yet unpublished short story Rilke's Ghost:

Years later. We’re now summering in Bürchen, Valais, Switzerland, in the chalet of a friend, our own house is rented to holiday makers. The village of Bürchen is wonderful, 1,600 meters up on the Alp, and so much cooler than the muggy summer-Riviera (the road up to Bürchen was finished in 1934—the preceding thousand years the villagers were left to their own devices). There is only one problem: Rainer Maria is buried nearby, yes, Rilke, in Raron, a small, historic town right beneath Bürchen down in the valley, three klicks as the crow flies. We’ve given Raron a wide berth so far, but Chang is playing the social networks and has to feed the hungry Facebook beast. His Korean followers can’t get enough of snow-topped mountains and Geranium-studded chalets, and the 24 hour cycle dictates daily posting. We’ve ravaged the entire region already—natives of many cultures believe that you steal their image when you take their picture—along those lines we’ve grabbed photons until nothing seems to be left of the Valais—from the Matterhorn via the James-Bond-historic-marker up on the Furka pass to the longest glaciers and highest vineyards of Europe—save Raron. 

This morning

Chang took this picture yesterday; we learned from our neighbor Dirk, who's a retired airline pilot, how this works: pilots call this phenomenon a "drop,"---a drop, if you will, of cold air that descends from the mountains and then drops through warmer air onto the warmer sea where it can trigger a middling thunderstorm, which this one did.