“I know exactly what you’re thinking,” Alessandro said, “but I’ll tell you, and you can do as you wish. For all I care, you can be the chief of the Academy. I’ll go back to the front. My blood will wash into the Adriatic before the ink on the pages of your fucking article is dry. It doesn’t matter. You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with no academies and no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound—where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love,
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