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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 14
Oh! it doesn't fall heavy on us, not even like our slightest sadness, which immediately falls upon our chest; on the contrary it takes it away from us at once; it does not burden us at all and in nothing, in not a thing produces any feel of burden, so as to attract anybody's curiosity to see what's behind it; None wants it to be removed even for a moment. It is like a cobweb cloth, like our Byzantine cloths of Patras, where a whole woman's dress could be contained into a nut; something less than a cloth; it does not produce the sense of not even the more fantastic silky veil; it does not have not even the material substance of a cloud; it does not produce the esthetic resistance of a cloud. The ray of sight doesn't hit anywhere; it penetrates pleasurably its body and stays. It makes itself perceptible, it seems like air a bit less material than the heavenly air; perhaps a bit denser; its body and line only cut the monotony of the heavenly air and heavenly color, by means of another air and another color. They are and they are like they are not. It is only the Pleasurable Light. - Leave, leave the Greek distastes, the wounded, rotten feelings which make you close your eyes tightly when someone next to you tells you to look at something, just because someone else told you; neither he made Hymettos, nor he made his eyes. These eyes tomorrow will melt and mean nothing more, than that one of us happened to see or say what the other one did not see or say. Put some brimstone to those fake prophets who make you look pathetic and funny, like itchy chicken in the wet dusk of an autumn chicken-house. And go, go see it by the sun fall when they play Music to it from Zappeion. It is softer and more pleasing than the Music.
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
