Contents |||
Writing Forum
||| Study Tools |||
Classical Literature
Search Port
||| Mail Pages |||
Blog
Can a landscape become a teacher? What is the nature of clarity?
Pericles Giannopoulos, Divine Appearances: the Greek Line & the Greek Color
Page 12
So, get up again there and revive your limbs from numbness. Let yourself again to the sight of Nature, trying now to feel and comprehend the Natural Color. To see this and its ethereal nature, observe again and first of all the Ground. It is very light. Observe the Faliric plain. Watched from above gives the sense that it is impossible to be more than a few fingers thick. It gives the sense of a thinly made extended cloth; its plantation world is very faint; just like fluff of woman's mustache. In order to see this thinness, when you are in Palaion Faliron observe the Karathanasopouleion Aktaion being like the heavy dream of a man with bad stomach, closed completely like a fort for life sentenced prisoners. One thinks it is going to cause Phaliron sink; One aesthetically wonders how is it possible such a thin base, such a thin ground, to carry such a volume, such a weight. Observe the... Mountains, quite light, elastic, they shrink, expand, get up, down, bigger, smaller, they move, walk, go forth and back. The mountains of Aegina sometimes come to Faliron. Hymettos in the morning goes far away; it usually seems to be two steps away; about sunset it arrives in Zappeion; our hand rises instinctively to touch its back. All the Nature around us, the earthy material, of colors, stones, hills, mountains, is so thin lined and thin colored, just if a Master Painter got off a natural perfect environment the substantial line and color beauty and synthesized a music-lined and pleasure-colored air graph. It is an Ideal image, like being ready to vanish; an illusion like the painting and sculpture illusions, produced by the enthusiastic mind of Poets that throws them before their eyes, and they see them, they paint them, they talk and sing to them. They exist and they don't. They are and they are not. They are not and we see them...
Cf. Images of Greece * Oscar Wilde, I stood upon the soil of Greece at last! * Jules Verne, Not anyone can see Naxos on the moon! * Mark Twain, Seeing Athens by stealth and moonlight * W. Davis, The Physical Setting of Athens
