[Photo Journal] Clouds Above Herrenchiemsee

Myra here.

Every Tuesday, we share photographs from our recent or long-ago travels, or just everyday stuff that appealed to our mindful eye and sharp sensibilities as captured through fleeting images.

Clouds Above Herrenchiemsee

One of the things I did last year while I was in Munich – and my family has already gone back to Singapore – was to visit neighboring areas around Bavaria, such as Herrenchiemsee, which was only a train ride away from Munich.

According to Wikipedia:

Herrenchiemsee is a complex of royal buildings on Herreninsel, the largest island in the Chiemsee Lake, in southern Bavaria, Germany. Together with the neighbouring isle of Frauenchiemsee and the uninhabited Krautinsel, it forms the municipality of Chiemsee, located about 60 kilometres (37 mi) southeast of Munich.

The palace looked gorgeous, but it was pretty overcast throughout the day when I came to this place. It rained a fair bit as well, so it was good that I spent most of my time indoors. Here are more photos with some quotes.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn’t like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. 
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

They told of dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horseman, swirling mists and sudden winds, insubstantial specters and sheeted creatures, vampires and bloodhounds, bats and rats and spiders, of men found at dawn and women turned white-haired and raving lunatic, and of vanished corpses and curses upon heirs.
― Susan Hill

Horses make a landscape look beautiful. 
― Alice Walker

He loved the extensive vaults where you could hear the night birds and the sea breeze; he loved the craggy ruins bound together by ivy, those dark halls, and any appearance of death and destruction. Having fallen so far from so high a position, he loved anything that had also fallen from a great height.
― Gustave Flaubert

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
― John Lubbock, The Use Of Life

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. 
― Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses… In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.
― Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Advice for a Young Investigator

The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

As I walked over the loose fragments of stone, which lay scattered and surveyed the sublimity and grandeur of the ruins, I recurred, by a natural association of ideas, to the times when these walls stood proudly in their original splendor, when the halls were the scenes of hospitality and festive magnificence, and when they resounded with the voices of those whom death had long since swept from earth. “Thus,” said I, “shall the present generation – he who now sink in misery – and he who now swim in pleasure, alike pass away and be forgotten. 
― Ann Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance