When you cast your eyes on some rare things, even when you know in advance what is coming, you cease to breathe & your heart is stricken & your eyes sting with tears. Some of the things that have had that impression on me in the past:
The Grand Canyon
Giant Sequoias
Angel jellyfish
Tennessee Williams' handwriting
The aurora borealis
This museum was build especially for him..a fitting alcove, lit by natural light
I creep closer, my mouth goes dry, my heart pounds...I didn't know he is so huge! Monumental.
The ambient noise becomes a muffled whisper...there is no one in this room but David & my worshipful attention. If there is a god, that god is surely the man who could carve such a being out of a discarded slab of marble. My eyes fill with tears & they are complex...almost painful.
He is divine from every side, every part of him, full of life & feeling, youth & peace.
Nothing in him surrenders, yet nothing confronts either.
How can that fingernail, those veins be made of marble?
Isn't that a pulse at his neck?, for surely he is man eternal, man's best self, purer than us all.
Today I went to the Accademe Gallery in Florence to see Michaelangelo's statue of David. In the summer, as is all of Florence, it's like an amusement park in here, with people packed shoulder to shoulder & ticket lines running for blocks & hours. It's still active in winter, though no where near as bad, & why not? Surely David is one of the most surpassingly exalted accomplishments of humankind. A thousand words could be writ & read, a thousand treatise expounded upon, a thousand likenesses in books gazed upon...& all that still could not prepare a person for David in the flesh.
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