a little quieter

Maybe I'm just projecting my own little weariness, but it has seemed to me that everyone on board has been a little quieter since we left Cape Town about 48 hours ago.  There would be a number of possible explanations:
1) South Africa offers a collection of intensities like no other port: some have to do with the country's painful racist history; some have to do with the country's painful economic present; some have to do with its astonishing beauty, from Table Mountain to the game reserves; some have to do with various aspects of 'adventure travel.'  I don't think anyone came back to the ship other than exhausted.
2) We are in any case on the home stretch, with everyone having a lot of work to do--in a typical semester we'd be just around Thanksgiving or well past spring break--and everyone recognizing too that we are near the journey's end.
3) Archbishop Tutu left us to go home, taking with him his own splendid laughter but also the billows of applause associated with his every public appearance.
4) On our first night out of Cape Town we had some heavy seas: it's hard to know how much of the subsequent fatigue has to do with the rolling itself, with medications various of us took to mitigate the effects of the rolling, or just with lost sleep as a consequence of the rolling.
5) And today there are of course the somber feelings and thoughts associated with the news from Brussels.  This is, unlikely as it may seem for a cruise ship in the sun on lovely seas, a place where people think.  And nothing is quieter than that.

towards Cape Town

Our time in India made a powerful impression, necessarily, on everyone who visited there—I don't think that's an exaggeration—and our one-day stay in Mauritius introduced most of us to a magnificent place we'd known little about.  We have had since then slightly rougher seas, not too bad but unfortunate in their timing because we've had a couple of new arrivals, and because it's a challenging time for a lot of students academically.

As for the new arrivals: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Prize-winner and genuine hero of our time, has arrived with his wife, Leah.  They will be with us until our next port, Cape Town.  Heads turn towards them in precisely the way I recall seeing heads turn towards Jackie O when I was at an Alvin Ailey performance in New York with a teacher of mine years ago.  Tomorrow is a No Class Day—these appear intermittently on the voyage calendar as breaks and study times—and the Archbishop will make his big public appearance for the voyage tomorrow afternoon in our one large room, The Kaisersaal, which fits all of us passengers at once.  His words are eagerly awaited.  I think I speak for many when I say that I find it deeply moving just to be in his presence.  What might distinguish me is how much relief and pleasure I am deriving from the presence of another new arrival, Professor John Bugbee, who has arrived to take the place of the Religious Studies professor who left us early in the voyage because of a health matter in his family.  I know Professor Bugbee to a brilliant teacher and scholar but share in everyone else's mild pity for his having to integrate himself into a community that has already shared so much.  He'll be wonderful at that, I think.

As for the challenges: We have held yesterday and today the 16^th meeting of each course on board, putting us 2/3 of the way through the voyage's classroom sessions.  Lots of courses have had exams and/or papers due in these last few days.  The exhaustion that comes from ambitious travels in the ports and time at sea does make it hard, sometimes, to rise to the academic occasions.  But the faculty have been deeply impressed by how well and consistently the students on board have so risen.

We zip along, the sea a brilliant blue, with whitecaps frequent.  Madagascar, I'm told, is somewhere nearby, though not, as far as I can tell, in sight: "nearby" is a very relative term in relation to the enormity of the seas.  Tonight the crew will put on its talent show, one of the program's traditions.