The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Doorman Shetty doesn’t know it, but he’s echoing Plato. This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium’s first speech about love: The gods honor zeal and heroic excellence towards love. But Orpheus … they sent back unfulfilled from Hades, sh

Where are you now, O Titanic seer, Prometheus of film? If the gods have punished you, if you’re chained to a pillar high up on an Alp while a vulture munches your guts, take comfort in the news. This just in: the gods are dead, but photography is alive & kicking. Olympus? Pah! It’s just a camera now.

Niépce, I bow my head to you. Great Nicéphore, I doff my beret. If Daguerre—like the Titan Epimetheus—was the one who opened this Pandoran box, unleashing the ceaseless click and snap, the interminable flash and sprocket of photography, still it was you, great Anarch!, who stole the gods’ gift of permanent vision, of the transformation of sight into memory, of the actual into the eternal—that is, the gift of immortality—and bestowed it upon mankind.

men and women, they die or wither away or retire. They vacate the stage and leave us alone upon it, stumbling over our lines. This, the myths hint, is what a mature civilization is: a place where the gods stop jostling and shoving us and seducing our womenfolk and using our armies to lave their poxy quarrels in our children’s blood; a time when they move back, still leering, still priapic, still whimsical, from the realm of the actual to the land of so to speak—Olympus, Valhalla—leaving us free to do our best or worst without their autocratic meddling.

In all the old stories, in different ways, the point is always reached after which the gods no longer share their lives with mortal

her happiness helped draw us back together, we became conscious of our joint importance in her life, of her overarching need. Such are the families of the modern epoch: elective alliances against terror or despair

his performances were extraordinary, his guitar never more achingly clear, like a desert wanderer’s dream of water in a cool clean well, his singing never so subtle or so strong.

A man has to belong to something, even if it’s just a golf club or a pet dog, and Ormus belonged to a memory now

So we repeat in ourselves the faults of the ones we have loved.

although I, we, didn’t really know them, they knew us, and whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be.