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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 9
No matter what Hymettos is, or Ardittous, or Aigaleo, or Parnis - even this very Pentelikon which looks like the strength of an Arcadian adolescent - even with the snowy top dawning to the rosy dome, all beautifully decorated simply tell like sculptures, like tomb figures: we are beautiful. In perfect lack of raisings and appeals and jumps to heavens, they watch down in attention and worship the earth. Even this very Pentelikon being like Artemis walking down a mountain, watches down, like old temples with their airy wings sloping, like statuses, like Byzantine domes, like Greek saints, the decorated, pleased, shining, hilarious, like seeing before them a nicely set table and smelling roasted lamb.
It is clearly, one only Line, getting up gently, getting down tenderly, waving in big calm waves, getting up harmonically, getting down symmetrically, writing in its way nice curvings, sometime raising in nervous adolescent litheness to a kiss of high air and lightness of sea-gull returning again to a soft rhythm of hers.
It is only one line, like our old art, where all buildings seem brothers, though none resembles the other, all statuses like twin brothers and none like the other, like our Byzantine art, like the country songs, that are mainly one song and none entirely alike, like our ground which is one in total and in every step unlike, like the Greek who is one in total and in every step never the same, proving even our very whole nature, of which a basic feature is: the unity of the important characteristics and the infinite variety of the secondary ones.
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
