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Overview
Ownership battles over the marbles removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin have been rumbling into invective, pleading, and counterclaims for two centuries. The emotional temperature around them is high, and steering across the vast past to safe anchor in a brilliant heritage is tricky. The stories around antiquities become distorted by the pull of ownership, and it is these stories that urge Patricia Vigderman into her own exploration of their inspiring legacy in her compelling extended essay, The Real Life of the Parthenon.
Vigderman’s own journey began at the Parthenon, but curiosity edged her further onto the sea between antiquity and the present. She set out to seek the broken temples and amphorae, the mysterious smiles of archaic sculpture, and the finely hammered gold of a funeral wreath among the jumbled streets of modern Athens, the fertile fields of Sicily, the mozzarella buffalo of Paestum. Guided along the way toward the enduring landscapes and fractured history by archeologists, classicists, historians, and artists—and by the desire they inspire—she was caught by ongoing, contemporary local life among the ruins. Gathering present meaning and resonance for the once and future remains of vanished glory, The Real Life of the Parthenon illuminates an important but shadowy element of our common cultural life: the living dynamic between loss and delight.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814275979 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Ohio State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2018 |
| Series: | 21st Century Essays |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 19 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To travel in search of the past is a well-known fool’s errand, and yet meeting one’s own ghost may indeed offer unexpected strength and splendor. The scattered relics of the past dare the living moment to enlarge itself, so as to encompass transience and loss. In The Odyssey, before Odysseus can find his way home he has to sail to the land of the dead: beyond the stream of Oceanus, to the level shores where the groves of Persephone shed their fruit, and down into the house of Hades. There he digs out a great trench, filling it with the blood of sacrificial sheep, and the dead flock toward him—to drink, and then to speak.
In an emotional reunion between living and dead, his mother, Anticleia, tells him how things have been in his home during the years of his absence. He longs to embrace her, but she flits away from his arms like a shadow or a dream, no longer flesh and bones. The past, like the dead, comes willingly to meet us when we cross the ocean of time. It speaks of things we love, but when we reach our arms to embrace it, it flits away like a shadow or dream.
For a time in my own youth, no doubt as generically sentimental and melancholy as Woolf’s, the Parthenon hovered above my summer landscape. Before Greece was an easy tourist destination, when the back streets of Athens often turned out to be unpaved and the recently constructed Athens Hilton was a daring speculation about the future, my parents were posted to the American Embassy there. With all my life to come, however, the famous ruined temple on its rubble-strewn mount and the vanished world it implied were mostly backdrop to my days on the whitewashed islands, in late afternoon cafés, and along oleander-lined roads toward the beaches. I was never quite present with the old bitten marble of the great temples, or alive to their monumental command.
As memory has it, the guarding of the entrance to the Acropolis was rather easygoing back then, and I’d once walked up in the moonlight with a man I was briefly in love with on the evening before he was to leave Greece. The event seemed unreal, an absurdly romantic situation for the finale to our last moments together. The white nakedness of the past rose above the shadowy guardedness of the present: the man, being older than I was, knowing we would not see each other again; me stumbling in my flimsy sandals on the stones. The national treasure, the ancient patrimony, shone above us on its fortress rock, the object of so much imaginative attention and so many complex desires, like mine on that long ago summer night.