ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Monte Davis]

mikebailey at speakeasy.net wrote:

>...The myth dissolving back into real life; the end of the Exposition coinciding with a bad depression; the ephemeral nature of the illusion of progress, "oh God, pride of man, broken in the dust again"...
>

>...the destroyed City as the sort of ruin that Walter Benjamin conceived of as the source of his art and thinking...
>
Now you've got me going: Gibbon sitting in the Roman Forum, the Tower of 
Babel, _le prince d'Aquitaine a la tour abolie_, "look on my works, ye 
mighty, and despair," the Mongols' visit to Baghdad -- which is the root 
for half a millennium of Islamic nostalgia. A-and we'll be seeing a 
number of Central Asian sites that either never recovered from the 
Mongols or slipped beneath the sand for cover (take your pick).