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Etruscan Places |
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written
by liu9700 / 10.24.2005 |
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Part 1: |
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With each descent Lawerence describes his find as though he has discovered a new microcosm of life, one better and improved from that he has known. His words give existence to the images on the walls of the dark, subterranean rooms. He reads the painted figures with all his senses; hearing the music and the beat of the dance, smelling the feast and feeling the excitement the small figures represent. He forces a vivid animation upon the dead, as only a dying man could.
At the time of writing Etruscan Places Lawerence was facing a barrier. In the Etruscans he found some degree of solace in the painted doors depicted on the walls of the tombs. They indicate not only a means for departing from this world but also for entering into the next. He saw in the Etruscans a people who faced the same door, who accepted it not as an end to life but a continuation. It was this attitude around death with which Lawerence found a connection. He needed to be able to know that there were a people whose culture accepted and appreciated this phase in the journey of life.
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Part 2: |
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One aspect of Lawerence’s writing that really strikes me is his description of the cities and the people he encounters on his way to the Etruscan Places. The world he describes is bleak, the people in it uncooperative. The sky is “gray and shapeless”, the coast “peculiarly forlorn” and the sea “flat and sunken.” Life is already beginning to lose its color for him. His dispute with the man at the hotel is a notable moment in the text. It indicates that Lawerence is no longer capable of interacting with the living.
For me the dominant image I have from Tarquinia is the act of descending into the tombs with the scent of smoke following behind me. As I gazed upon images of the afterlife the smoke served as a stark reminder of the world above. More than that, the smoke reminded me of all the millennia of life in this region that had passed since the tomb’s creation, from the time its occupant roamed the world under the same sun I had just left. Perhaps this is an indication of my unwillingness to face my own mortality, that for the moment I am content to leave it as an unacknowledged point of my future. The tombs were one of my favorite sites of this entire program. They provided such an intimate connection to a people long lost. But all the while I was beneath the ground I couldn’t help but feel the weight of the dirt above – a suffocating force, and a small urgency in the back of my mind to return to the surface before the only exit I could fathom mysteriously disappeared and I would have to remain down there forever.
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