Maritzburg College School Magazine Maritzburg College Magazine 2016 electronic | Page 84

OTHER ACTIVITIES
New York Stock Exchange, powerhouse and barometer for the whole
economic world. We saw, too, Federal Hall, across the road, where
George Washington took the oath of office in 1789.
Up the hill again to the umbrageous churchyard of Trinity Church, there
to see the grave of Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of the US Treasury,
killed in a notorious pistol duel in 1804. It was a revelation to me that there
are so many beautiful tree-shaded squares and churchyards with ferns
and mossy tombstones among the skyscrapers and neon lights. The city
is not totally a concrete jungle, but offers places and sights of unexpected
gentleness and beauty.
Before leaving Manhattan we went, as to a shrine, to Ground Zero. The
enormous site is still not completely restored, but we saw the celebrated
‘survivor tree’ and dabbled our hands in the symbolic water of life and
renewal in the sixty foot deep pools which fill the excavated footprint of
each tower. And we looked up at the slim silver and blue ‘replacement’
tower that again dominates the skyline of Lower Manhattan.
Next day we drove down through New Jersey on our way to Washington.
En route we paused in Princeton, a film set-pretty town, seat of Princeton
University. Again a most beautiful campus, ‘dorms’ and libraries set among
lawns and trees and splendid architecture. Some gob-smacking statistics,
among them, the almost casual information that the university ‘endowment’
is 23 billion dollars!
We were driven in the coach through the ‘genius neighbourhood’. Here
lived Einstein, in a pretty white house, after he fled Germany in 1933.
Also TS Eliot and another of the most brilliant mathematicians, John Forbes
Nash, subject of the film, ‘A Beautiful Mind’. We were shown a house
where F Scott Fitzgerald lodged and where he met poor crazy Zelda.
(When he was sent down because he h