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Can a landscape become a teacher? What is the nature of clarity?
Pericles Giannopoulos, Divine Appearances: the Greek Line & the Greek Color
Page 13
Such a phantom is thickening, thinning, seeming intensively or faintly moving, getting closer and away, formed in a thousand ways, colored in a million ways, evaporated, esthetically ready to vanish any minute. The spectator, however accustomed may be to this view, is never full, wanting to see without interval and while seeing is always scared, each time and ever, that the illusion will be gone just like an immaterial creature of Fantasy: It is Earth esthetically Immaterial. Stony constructions, rocky, hilly, Rocks, Hills, Mountains - imagine what soils, what stones, what weights, what millions of tons of matter the hill of Filopappos is, or Lykabettous - they are like the swelled cheeks of a child blowing a flute, like playful multicolored swells flying on the air. All soils, from the lowest dump sands of the beaches to the highest dry rocks of Hymettos, Pentelikon and Parnis are light like Clouds. Just observe Hymettos: it's wholly near us; the whole in front of us, in front of our feet, upon our chest, before our eyes; although esthetically it doesn't give us the sense of a MOUNTAIN. Anything but this; one wants it; needs it; it's the sweet mountain of the thief; he loves it; he separates from it in sorrow, it's the thief's song: farewell sweet mountains.
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
