Rome Journal XIII: Ruins

drawing by Hallie Cohen

Tintern Abbey is a famous ruin. Wordsworth’s poem, “Tintern Abbey”(1798) reflects the once grand structure's sublimity. Allen Ginsberg took an acid trip in Tintern Abbey from which he wrote “Wales Visitation” (1967). Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) expresses a similar sentiment through the epitaph of a great king.  Rome makes a mere ruined abbey look sick. It’s a ruins party. You could say about the bus lines of the city, that all roads lead to Rome, the Rome of antiquity that is. If you take the number 75 bus down from the Gianicolo Hill you will come to the Colosseum. But when you start to hang around Rome for a while, you get used to these great monuments, these vestiges of the past. You begin to take them for granted and as your 75 slows down in traffic, the Colosseum begins to look like any slum. Of course neither the Forum nor the Pantheon can be compared to the favelas of Rio, but it starts to make you question your cultural assumptions. Sure these ruined abbeys, forums and colosseums keep archeologists in business. However, these edifices are built on prime pieces of real estate.  One Roman realtor advertises the Colosseum Apartments, which are actually near the Forum and if you’re in Manhattan you might want to consider buying something at the Colosseum on 116^th and Riverside which commemorates the past with its curved façade. Unlike Rome’s Colosseum, this building actually has electricity.

Cadaverville

RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource

Heidegger said that the only way to live an authentic existence is through the awareness of death. By this definition Zadie Smith is living an inauthentic existence since she is not capable of entertaining the notion of her own impermanence. In her essay “Man vs. Corpse,” (The New York Review of Books, December 5, 2013) she writes, “death is what happens to everyone else. By contrast the future in which I am dead is not a future at all.” All of this is sparked by her viewing, “Man Carrying a Corpse,” a drawing by Luca Signorelli. The painting shows is a dorsal view of a naked man carrying a naked corpse over his shoulder. Smith’s musing recalls W.G. Sebald, the author of such tomes as the Rings of Saturn who was often set off by the objects and places that that catalyzed memory and a feeling of eternity. You find a similar sentiment in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” where ruins conjure the same sublime feelings about the finitude of the human enterprise. Still Smith’s inability to entertain the idea of her own death is an improvement on the delusion of unending progress that modernity presents. “Death is rarely seriously imagined or even discussed—unless some young man in Silicon Valley is working on permanently eradicating it,” she remarks. “Yet a world in which no one, from policymakers to adolescents, can imagine themselves as abject corpses—a world consisting only of thrusting vigorous men walking boldly out of frame—will surely prove a demented and difficult place in which to live. A world of illusion.” Smith ends her essay quoting a skit by Louis C.K. about the juggernaut of technology that is the insulin which puts are death consciousness into remission, “You never feel completely sad or completely happy, you just feel kinda satisfied with your products, and then you die.”

Here Today Gone Today

Photo: Lucas Taylor

In l0 to the l00th power years watch out. Dennis Overbye quotes that piece of exponential data from a paper written by Joseph Lykten, of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Maria Spiropulu of Caltech in a recent article in Science Times, (“Finding the Higgs Leads to More Puzzles,” NYT, 11/4/13).  As Overbye points out, “The idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it. Naturally, we would have no warning. Just blink and it’s over.” Not with a bang, but with a blink. Even though l0 to the l00th may seem like a lot of years, those great grandchildren to the l00th power are still flesh and blood and one feels for anyone who goes from living a full and active life to non-existence. Of course, non-existence is the great leveler and the Higgs boson will mete out a kind of poetic justice for those who have entered the sweepstakes, spending their lives vying for the great rewards, only to find themselves continually left in the dust. If the lines from Shelley's “Ozymanidas,” “Look on my works, yet Mighty, and despair" is a source of consolation to these poor devils, then the demise of the Higgs field will help them to reap their ultimate vengeance. If only they were still here to experience it. Beauty, intelligence, cunning would all be for nought. Overbye quotes Prospero, “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air: and…leave not a rack behind.” Or to quote Ecclesiastes,  “vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”  But is it worth the "50 years and $l0 billion or so” that Overbye’s piece describes as having been expended to tell us this?