Culture

Yesterday I stumbled across the word again, this time in a narrative about a circumnavigation. The author met a captain of a cargo ship that was trading all over the world. They met in the Solomon Islands and the captain looked like a movie star. Top Gun sunglasses, crisp white shirt, tanned like Tarzan, and efficient like hell.

But the only thing he talked about was his home in Hamburg. He said he missed the cooler climate there, and the food, and the fact that things worked when you expected them to. But what he missed most of all, he said, was the culture. He was talking about the theater, and the opera, maybe even the movie theaters. He was thinking of museums and jazz festivals, galleries and exhibitions.

The same captain refused an invitation to visit the yachtie on his boat and never spent any time at all with the people from the Solomon Islands or anywhere else. He didn't even realize that he sailed right past places with cultures just as diverse and interesting as his own, cultures that probably won't be around for much longer. He was blind to everything that didn't fit into his scheme of things.