Status Updates From The Leopard

The think they are gods, their vanity is stronger than their misery describing the inability of Sicilians to change their lot after 2,500 years of foreign intervention oppressed by poverty, indifference, the stultifying heat of long summers. I thought how appropriate this line is today to the politics of voting against your own interests identifying a political stance of middle aged males around the world.

ART has two constant unending preoccupations; it is always meditating upon death and it is always creating life. Boris Pasternak. Death and life always exist side by side in The Leopard. Decline and renewal are everywhere. The past inhabits the present. The dead surface. The living are dying. The imagery on the page, adorning the rooms dead but living, animated by tromp l'oeil effects and Art everywhere.

That's the leopard - the main event here - finished. Felt a bit fragmentary really, as if it were just the chapters focusing on Don Fabrizio and a few interludes extracted from a much larger family saga. Oddly ambivalent in many ways; the "everything has to change so that everything can stay the same" line that gets quoted from it a lot has proven to be utterly misguided by the end. Rather enjoyed it.