I'm currently treating myself to one chapter a night of Elizabeth Gilbert's prose before bedtime, which is still unfortunately a ways off at the moment. Here's a great description of Venice, a place that I too found disturbingly melancholy on my one visit there. I just wanted to sleep through it:
"Venice seems like a wonderful city in which to die a slow and alcoholic death, or to lose a loved one, or to lose that murder weapon with which the loved one was lost in the first place...
The whole town is peeling and fading like those suites of rooms that once-rich families will barricade away in the backs of their mansions when it gets too expensive to keep the maintenance up and it's easier to just nail the doors shut and forget about the dying treasures on the other side - this is Venice. Greasy streams of Adriatic backwash nudge up against the long-suffering foundations of these buildings, testing the endurance of this fourteenth-century science fair experiment -Hey, what if we built a city that sits in water all the time?
...Yet I don't get depressed here. I can cope with, and even somehow enjoy, the sinking melancholy of Venice, just for a few days. Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it" (100-101).
Other places that just scream Albrecht Durer's Melancholia to me are:
The USAirways gate at the Philadelphia Airport
Charlottesville
Knoxville
Wal-Mart
I can't think of any more at the moment, which I will take as a good sign.
1 comment:
I love that feeling! I love cities that feel like that. Because they're unpretentious, and often forgotten. (Roanoke (VA) is like that, in places. But Charlottesville? Everyone here in Lexington thinks Charlottesville is overrun with the too-rich.)
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