Thursday, August 16, 2007

Google Giorgio de Chirico!

It is just before 7:00 p.m. and almost time for supper. I have just walked back from the gym to the apartment, and I did not see a soul. From the gym, I walk past one dormitory, through a courtyard, by the dining hall, and as I turn the corner, I see down past my dormitory and several other buildings to the parking lot.

These buildings at KA are just splendid. It was a Turkish-born, London-based architect who specializes in fusing the tastes from the West with the tastes of the East, who designed the campus; hence the look of a college campus that has gone through an Islamic cookie press, if you will. The buildings are quite nice, but there is something a little eerie in making this walk and not seeing anyone. Not scary at all, just very, very still.

I didn’t open all my boxes at once the other day. I decided to savor them a bit more, (yes, one needs to pace oneself with activities until the full force of school life begins!) and only open 1 or 2 boxes a day. Yesterday I opened the box containing my beloved, yet monstrous, Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages” textbook I have used the last six years with AP Art History. I was paging through the book for a little while, enjoying the trip down memory lane with the art works and reminding myself of the sensational students I met doing that course. I came across a painting from 1914, a work by Giorgio de Chirico entitled, “Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.” You really should go to Google Images and see it now. Do you know how to do that? Go to Google.com and right next to the word “Web” on the left will be Images. Click onto Images, and search for the painting.
Did you find it?

This is how KA looked today as I walked back (minus the strange little girl with her chasing her hoop). Thursday afternoon of course is the beginning of the weekend here, and so the staff had headed home, and many on campus, obviously, had left, creating an unusually deserted feeling. In the textbook, the author notes that de Chirico’s scene recalls Nietzsche’s “foreboding that underneath this reality in which we live and have our being, another and altogether different reality lies unconcealed.”

Oh my. I am not sure if I subscribe to the Nietzschean foreboding at all, but you know art historians, always enjoying a metaphysical moment!

What I think is invigorating is that a week from right now the campus will have the 102 students joining us for the opening year of KA here for the four-day orientation period. Today is maybe one of the last days I will walk around and see the imposing buildings and be struck by a stillness of any kind!

I am not one to indulge in much stillness. Hmmm…Interesting exercise being still. But as dusk gives way to what a writer I like calls “the violet hour,” I am enjoying this “mystery” of what will be.

2 comments:

Me and My Son said...

What an beautiful description. Great way to end the evening. Thanks!

Steph

My Song said...

"Be Still and Know that I AM God."
Psalm 46:11

Yeah...it's a good thing!