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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 5
Giannopoulos was born in Patras, Greece (1869). He studied medicine in Athens and Paris, and he lived for a while in London. He wrote poems and essays, and he translated in Greek works by Dickens, Poe, Baudelaire, Wilde and others. Giannopoulos' main concern was to grasp the Greek sense of things.
I asked children, men, women, old men, every kind of our own men and strangers as well: You see, this scrap, stone, branch, goat corn, the beard of the male goat at the distant hill? Everybody told me:- I see it.
Now, turn your back to the falling sun and watch the fully lighted Acropolis. Watch the rising hill with its pine-trees, olive-trees, and the finest lines. Watch the outgoing curving side of the rose-colored rocks from its gate to Herodeion and beyond; all light like baltasar letters. Watch the Propylaia, the appearing Parthenon -an artistic piece of work, wonderful, natural flower, harmonized and expressing it - they are all lighting and shining. And you just think they do not look the way they used to, because the time crunched , rain washed the colors, the wound fattened and strengthened the lines. Just visualize that you stand at Propylaia; visualize you have before you a modern building. All the architectural and sculptural details, periods, phrases, words, points, commas, all are easily read, the way letters of a newspaper held in your hands are. It is the complete Greek of everything in everything Clarity.
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
