Skip to main content

Italian Reflections (Cont.): The Platypus Travels Part XIII


It's really a laser designed to combat Rosicrucian vampires from the renewed Byzatine Empire.  Shhh...


Conspiracy theories aside, it is rather hard to know what to do with the Vatican.  The crowds are so enormous that it's difficult to get any good pictures, let alone see the marvelous things that literally cover the walls, ceilings, and floors.  The above tapestry, for instance, was done by Raphael with real thread-of-gold that glistens when you shine a light on it.  There's a long hallway full of these.  You're on a time-crunch and swimming amidst a vast human sea; which ones do you look at?  Which ones can you look at.  Then there's this thing called a "camera" strapped to your wrist.  You know that you're supposed to be photo-recording this trip, but that takes time and effort away from actually looking at the art, let alone keeping the students corralled.  See what I mean?

On the other hand, YOU'RE IN THE VATICAN.  A few brief glimpses of this and that and a minute to stare at the Pieta is more than most people ever get.  The crowds as well are part of the experience, part of seeing the vast cultural-religious-political entity that is the Vatican.  After all, what did you go out to Italy to see, a reed swayed by the wind?

In the end, I was quite content with my trip to the Vatican -I just don't have much of it to show to you.

These fragments have I shored against my ruins
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Tolkien's Dark Tower: The Platypus Reads Part CLXXXVI

Tom Shippey points out in his Road to Middle Earth that the germ of Barad Dur, Sauron's Stronghold, comes from a scrap of Chaucer where the poet makes an offhand reference to a knight and his approach to "the dark tower."  Chaucer expected that everyone knew that story, but somehow in the intervening centuries it has become lost.  Using his imagination, Tolkien tried to delve back into the mine of story and imagine what this Dark Tower might have been.  We see several tries at this image, or several "accounts" in Tolkien's corpus.  The first is Thangorodrim, Morgoth's "dark tower," where he sits "on hate enthroned."  The second, and like unto it, is Sauron's original keep at Tol Sirion.  This is the dark tower before which Luthien, in all her frailty, stands and lays the deepest pits bare with her song (an image oddly reminiscent of protestant poets like Spenser, Bunyan, and Wesley).  Building on these two images, Tolkien constru...
4 comments
Read more

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more