Do you ever see people whose faces echo another era?
Iâve seen women with the round faces, sparse brows and high foreheads of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Men with dark brows that meet in the middle, olive skin, strong noses and jawsâByzantine men, ghosts of Constantine, reanimated faces from the Fayum Mummy Portraits.
Women with soft figures and the large eyes and prim, petaled mouths of the 19th century.
Grizzled men whose brows predicate their gaze, whose wrinkles track into their thick beards and read like topographical maps of hardship and intensityâthe wanderer, the poet; Whitman, Tolstoy, Carlyle.Â
Faces sculpted into the perfect, deified symmetry of the pharaohsâalmond eyes, full lips, self-assurance 3,000 years in the making staring at you at a stoplight. Â
Plump, curved white wrists curled over purse handles in the waiting room and you think Versailles, Madame Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great. Wide cheek bones, courage and sorrow in the scrunched face of the old man in line behind you and itâs Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh. Reddened skin, thick forearms, hair and beard and brows burned by the cold into a reddish corn silk and you think Odin, the forge and the hammer and skin stinging from the salt of the ocean.
Virginia Woolfâs quiet brand of gaunt frankness surveys you in passing in the parking lot. Queen Victoriaâs heavy-lidded stare and beaked nose are firmly, uncannily fixed on a sixth-grade classmateâs face.
Renaissance voluptuousness on the boardwalk by the beach. Boticelliâs caramel androgyny in a youth smoking on a bench outside the mall.
Jazz age looseness spurs the tripping gait of the man who watches you paint with his hands in his pockets, and he smiles a Sammy Davis Jr. smile and tells you that you look familiar, that heâs sure heâs seen you somewhere before, but he doesnât know where or when.
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2087
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