Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
 This is not me. This is Simu Liu. But you get the idea. I think it was Professor Elaine Scarry who defined beauty as the quality that inspires the desire both to possess and to replicate.
It’s always struck me as a very good definition. And, living the way I do, I constantly see the idea in action. At every scenic spot, every brilliant sunset, every famous castle or palace, hordes of tourists snap photos of the same things. In the age of the smartphone, one marvels at the thought of how much of humanity’s collective data storage capacity is taken up with endlessly repeated (and mostly bad) photos of the same sights and things and places. But unlike many other seasoned travelers, I do not judge too harshly the amateur photographers. First of all, I’m not sure I’m in any position to throw stones. Secondly, they do no more than what beauty requires of them: taking a photo of something is at once an act of possession and of replication. But a recent piece in the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino on the “Instagram face” has me revisiting this concept of beauty. Scarry’s definition applies to human appearance as much as it does to sunsets and paintings and vistas. Beautiful people inspire eros, and sex is at once an act of possession and of replication in its possibility of multiplying the species — which was why Freud equated it with the will to life itself. I was recently in Venice for the third time in my life: it seems that, without so planning, I go to that most splendid city once every decade. When we miss a destination or decide to skip it, we always say “next time” or “it’ll still be there.” But Venice actually may not still be there by the end of this century. A city of marble built on a lagoon, there is a very good chance that by then it will be underwater, a modern day Atlantis. Mere days before I arrived, the city had suffered terrible flooding. The interior of the iconic Basilica di San Marco was knee-deep in water. And that’s only as far as our climate projections go. Projections never say what happens after 2100, as though climate change will magically stop the moment the clock ticks over, because we neither can nor want to contemplate the possibilities. Look around Venice and you see the celebrations of the achievements of past centuries: wings in the magnificent galleries are devoted to the trecento then the quattrocento then the cinquecento — the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s — down to modern times. But there will probably never be a Venetian art of the 2100s. Not only is the time horizon of our climate projections pathetic when compared to the reckoning of the earth, but it is pitiable even when measured against our own humanistic achievements.  Venice and the water that will one day blanket it. Several factors have conspired to put my mind on the things that we own, that I own, and our relationship to them. Last weekend’s episode of “Patriot Act” on Netflix taught me that, in the 1980s, the average American bought 12 new items of clothing every year. Now that number is 68. And much of the increase is due to the rise of “fast fashion,” the production and purchasing of cheaply and quickly made clothes followed by their equally rapid transformation into trash. And it is now the holiday season on the Western calendar. This past Thursday was Thanksgiving in the US, that celebration of the seemingly unbounded plenty that the New World was supposed to provide. Thanksgiving was of course followed by Black Friday, that annual ritual of Americans lining up outside and then pushing into stores like a stampede out of “The Lion King.” In fact, one of my curmudgeonly pet peeves about the world is that many other countries, even without Thanksgiving, have adopted Black Friday in an effort to encourage consumerism.  Black Friday in Italy. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
March 2020
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