do

Boredom is a kind of pain, and should be reacted to as such.

transparency

Opacity saves us.  Imagine your eyes held open to the thoughts, even merely the lives, or even only the relatively happy lives, of others - even a few dozen others.

Dubai 2345

There is a numbing quality to seeing Florence that damps the excitement of the art and innovation.  Unlike Chichen Itza or Yosemite - or even Milan - Florence was destined to be a tourist city, and deserves it by merit and demerit alike.  The numbness comes from commerce.  This was art commissioned by, for and directed to merchants, on the whole, though with a sizable slice reserved for God, for innovation, for delight, and for the artists themselves, in their non-commercial aspects.

One sees that the current, money-soaked, transparently mercenary art world is a repetition, and therefore largely a result of certain conditions that have recurred.  In today's Florence - I mean the historic core, not the ordinary automobile-and-supermarkets city that surrounds it - you are either a rich tourist, or a spiritually and historically minded tourist, or you are cattle, to be fed watery gelato, shuttled through a few key (but generally not best) sites, and packed onto rail cars for the ride home.  In Medici Florence, you were a merchant, a spiritual, an artist, or fodder.

I've had the time and means to travel to places that awe: Walpi, Durham, Uxmal.  And nearing these one feels a sort of embarrassment - the sense that one must tread gently, quiet one's thoughts, and be grateful.  In Florence, there is no embarrassment.  The city has you trodding on monk's graves - there is no other way to the ticket stand to see the cloistered spaces within.  There's no point in feeling sacred about the profaned.

So what to do?  How to enjoy and absorb such a city?  Straddle.  Find the smaller spaces of excellence. Casa Martelli, the Bargello, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the gaze of a character straight out from a minor panel of a bronze door, looking at you.  Eat simply.  Then take some time to be the shopper, the merchant, the crass, walleted animal that would go to the Gucci Museum.  Fight the nausea and understand - and if the Gucci Museum won't teach it, little will - that merchandising is the art of throwing fake pearls before those who've learned to imitate swine.  Go to the Cappelle Medicee and see what it means for true narcissists to go hog wild for exotic colored marble - at the Pietre Dure you'll learn that they bought so much of it, from the four corners of the globe, that hundreds of years later, they are warehousing enough exotic stone to last hundreds of years more, even if they were still building, and not merely restoring.

In the end, why see Florence and its like?  Because it is does not transport the modern visitor, but instead reports.  It reports to the modern visitor that our condition is simply a mode of living that has long been with us, in the merchant cities.  Aniline, pacific and selfish.

sing

Give me five minutes to tell the unvarnished truth, and I'll sadden anyone.

Milan and Florence in view

Milano and Firenze

epoch

Imitation is the sincerest form of boredom.

Firenze

If you would have the arts flourish, bring your checkbook.  Art is not culture, nor society, but an act of each upon wealth.  In New York, they might almost be called the Metropolitan Museum of Wealth and the Museum of Modern Wealth.

a cord of chords

That which is right and durably profitable is hard or by chance. Of chance nothing need nor usefully can be said. Of what is hard, then: most such is not both right and durably profitable; much is neither. So we hazard, do without, or discern amongst difficulties. This discernment of right profit is by iteration, inversion and study. That is our prime work; it is wisdom. Upon it, our second and third work: accordingly to serve and so to build.

George Eliot

The Kingdom of Heaven is one of those rare theological ideas with use, beauty and power outside its specific religious frame.  It articulates that strange, invisible, but present fabric of good that binds society - or that, absent, consigns a people to chaotic evil.  I learned what the Kingdom of Heaven is, and how it helps us to understand it, as much from Eliot as from the gospels.

how many proverbs did you need

Intelligence is less often so much overrated as it is oversupplied - in cities.  The intelligent person can do wonders with a tree or field, stream or shelter - wonders unavailable to the stupid.  But there is less the intelligent can do in society extensive and fluid enough - ours - to sort the intelligent and stupid into their own communities.  In competition with peers, the intelligent lose their advantage; in cooperation with peers, they loose their needfulness.

grabbing

I shall run out of Earth, or my interest in it as an observer, before I come to an end of myself.  And in this is the need of work beyond pay.

Fred Rogers

Nothing is harder than righteous decency.  It is utterly breakable, but only from within, and demands one be true right through.

sins of the office

False precision.  Intensified language as a form of courtesy.  Degrading one institution or person for having faults shared by all, or nearly all.  Shifting rather than handling.