This looks like a solitary walk, but someone must have taken this picture. I am caught on one foot ascending the Fiesolean hills, my climb directed towards a raspberry sunset. I am looking up and out, heedless to the vertical crack, my squiggled path, in the gray pavement. Gray is not ugly in Florence. The Florentine stone of medieval identity is a slate of sorts. The Medici family with their dukes, and popes, and queens of Spain, and young scholars who hid in studiolos, they wanted lions carved of hard gray stone--let the other cities and the churches have the splendid, speckled marble. I form another slanted shadow, to match the one that follows me and that promises to intersect with the present but yet unnoticed horizontal crack (which stayed unnoticed until I saw this photograph). The stone walls have been injected with lamps, but I left Fiesole along with il sole so I can not attest to the light they might produce.
On an aesthetic level, the beauty of stone and boots is matched by the consciousness of the shadow in front as much as by the one that follows. We would not really want to be without our shadow. On a metaphorical level, grey is the grey of Stalinian steel, of Shostakovich's string quartets, of computer technology, of Hegel's owl, and finally, emerging from all of these, of Athena's eyes. What do sunglasses hide?
ReplyDeletedear kate,
ReplyDeletei became a follower, and i did my part to let you be one, too. I'm glad we got to chat today!