The Honeymoon Essays, part 2: In Search of Lost Time
Sicilian Architecture; Marcel Proust's big book; Time; Minimalism is terrible
Today, I’m writing from Modica, one of those picturesque Sicilian towns, one of those absurdly quaint places a few thousand years old, where every house and church is built of stone and terraced into the hillsides, rolling fortresses built by uncomplaining stonemasons who build purposefully and without any end in sight, their unusual Sisyphean grace more foreign to me than their language, the terra cotta roofs grown over with patinas of lichens, strange ivies and succulents hanging endlessly from third story balconies, the customized and distinctive Sicilian baroque architecture with all its grotesquerie of masks and chubby putti supporting balconies, its wrought iron balustrades with fanciful cuneiforms of pageantry for no reason other than it being fabulous. Old ladies stand on their balconies, leaning against the railings, always looking out at the craggy postcard in front of them like quiescent ruins still barely in tact, the crude beauty against a setting sun, at their beige world of neatly stacked rocks, thinking about god knows what. They’ll politely wave, if I wave, but they are mostly uninterested. It must be strange to live in a profoundly humble and yet opulent town, a place that is the only world you really know, and people from all over the world come to your town just to eat noodles and take pictures of themselves in front of your church, a church that they’ll never attend, of a god they don’t understand or believe in.
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