The Detour

And this is why, perhaps, the Italians were better off selling some of their national art. Because they too often thought: What’s the difference? A few kilometres off the main road, a few hours off schedule, a few pieces of straw from the crate. Everything was flexible, everything emotional.

The only kind of passion i had managed to sustain was my passion for art, itself a substitution for other losses. And yet it remained to be seen if that passion would itself be my undoing, and it there would be nothing left to hold onto, even if the most carefully carved marble would price itself to be inconstant, insignificant, ultimately worthless.

Could I tell you whether a nation should have been escalating its acquisitions of fine art, rather than feeding its people, or finding some future for its youth beyond the trench, the munitions factory, or the museum?

All too often, a quick glance often the shoulder could turn into a risky detour.

It would have been a fitting punishment, too, for a man who had been obsessed with a lifeless marble icon–to be remembered merely as a stand-in for someone or something else, rather than loved as something real, inconvenient, flawed.