Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Not Ozymandias
I find the resurrection of Marcus Aurelius strangely moving. I can't stop looking at the great foot, the arm clutching a fragment of a globe and the stupendous head. It may be an Ozymandias moment, but I don't think so. Perhaps because he was a thinker as much as an emperor, it is the survival of Marcus one notices, not his fragmentation.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
We have difficulty with the split the Old Med world had with the public and the private. And with what they had as public. With MA, we have one of the few writings of the private realm, where one feels an intruder when one reads.
ReplyDeleteFunny though,-the first bit of that film,real enough- he was not beyond rubbing out a tribe or two when the mood was on him.
A well rounded gent for his time.
Resurrected with the help of "regurgitated owl pellets" apparently. Strange bedfellows!
ReplyDeleteWhen an earthquake toppled that statue, and the baths it was in, Marcus Aurelius was as remote in time from the Sagalassians of the day as we are from Elizabeth I or Charles II. I wonder what they thought of him. Maybe they didn't. He was just there, and always had been. A giant foot on which to hang a towel.
OMG: Patrick McGoohan is descended from Marcus Aurelius! Those lips, those eyes....the Same!
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