#istory

Ancient Etruscan vase: This monster is unknown, possibly from Etruscan mythology, which is little known. Given the long flexible tail, I would guess a lion—they likely still lived in Italy at this time, perhaps 500 BC. The Etruscans left us many examples of beautiful vases like this.

Ismailia, Egypt

Wooden phallic mace made by the Kanak people of New Caledonia, 19th century.

It was late August; Venice was swarming with tourists—girls in miniskirts (this was the moment when girls’ legs were displayed for appraisal like wares before an auction), young and not-so-young men in jeans—and the city teemed with the typical, chaotic crowds of tourists, people who’d fled their offices, their histories, their dignity, their cares—but not their sex. Venice was emblematic and enigmatic: the canals’ cloudy waters reflected palaces, and they also seemed to reflect all the poems ever written about that city. Rilke and Aleksandr Blok drifted through the dark water. Chateaubriand passed nearby. Hofmannsthal observed churches, museums, human beings, with astonishment. Goethe wrote his letters to Mrs. Stein (but not to Gertrude). Baron Corvo was hungry and hunted for an Englishman whom he could drag to dinner. Henry James sat, artifically erect, upon a bench. I understood then (or maybe it only seems so now, many years later) that this was one of those mythic cities that defied familiarity, comprehension. One of those cities swathed in a haze of fame, one of those cities where symbols overlap reality, where the waters of memory carry greater weight than the droplet of the present, than today’s teardrop. A city where current dramas count for nothing, hold no meaning, since the mighty burden of the past overshadows them, mocks them.