Thinking of gentle-eyed Mazzini with his lambent dreams, the observer would sense frailness, a poet-liberal. But if he kept watching long enough the plasma behind those eyes would soon run through every fashionable permutation of grief—financial trouble, declining health, destroyed faith, betrayal, impotence, loss—until eventually it would dawn on our tourist that he had been attending no wake after all: rather a street-long festival of sorrow with no booth the same, no exhibit offering anything solid enough to merit lingering at.
