7. The Acropolis
In both high school and college, I took art history classes. They were part of my major: art. The high school was a magnet school you had to apply to with a little doodle portfolio and there was a pretty direct line from there to my college, where I earned a bachelor of arts degree. None of this culminated in a job that involved visual art in any way. I’ve been paid to paint a mural at a kid’s theater and make pretty good props for sketch shows. Maybe this is because I barely paid attention in art history class.
It was a great place to doze off, especially in college, where I was seeing the basics of Greco-Roman antiquity for a second time in a small dark room with no windows, the clinking slide projector humming as it gently blew dust into our brains, the professor’s voice droning on and on. And this was all happening only twenty minutes after I shoved a falafel sandwich down my throat for lunch. I could not have stayed awake if I wanted to. Sometimes I did want to. I’m sleepy and lazy, but curious! Even with the best of intentions, my head would start to nod and I’d drift off before shocking awake with a gasp from ancient architecture-induced sleep apnea.
Art students, especially young arrogant ones, are forced to take art history classes so they don’t go around reinventing the wheel. Optimally, learning something about art history will mean your own work is “in conversation” with that history and with the modern world’s relationship to that history. Nothing I have ever made in school or in the privacy of my home since has had anything to say to the Acropolis or its buildings. This is probably why I am not an artist.
The Acropolis is much greater than me, of course, happy to admit it. It’s been around for about 25 centuries and it’s unlikely I’ll even live for one. I was only in Athens for a few days and planned badly. When I’m in a new place, I walk around and sometimes Google stuff without planning ahead or take a public bus somewhere as a cheap sightseeing trip. By the time I leave, I know what a really good trip itinerary would be. Embarrassingly, in last minute planning desperation, I will sometimes buy tickets to things on tour websites because they offer options to skip the line and they list the biggest hits in town immediately, so you don’t have to figure out what those are. It did seem very stupid to be in Athens and not see a bunch of old stuff, so I bought an archeological combo ticket on one of these websites. What I really wanted to do was sit in a square and drink wine and eat tiny fried anchovies and watch kids play soccer and adults gossip on the church steps. But thinking of all those years I’d spent barely keeping my eyes open to look at gritty slide projections made me go.
Traveling is probably one of the most sinister things I participate in voluntarily. We all do morally questionable things out of necessity and/or ignorance, but I know that tourism is usually extractive and fucked up, and I still choose to do it. I could make a lot of rationalisations about why it’s okay for me, specifically, to take planes everywhere and dip in and out of people’s real life neighborhoods etcetera. There really aren’t good ones, I just don’t like the alternative of staying home. And if you ever catch someone rationalizing something they know is wrong, that’s usually what’s happening. They could do the right thing, but the alternative to the wrong thing isn’t something they’d like to do. It’s really that simple a lot of the time.
Another side of it is that most people will never notice or care if someone else is doing the right thing (according to their own principles) with their daily life choices. I can’t imagine anyone would if I stopped traveling. If I do officially stop someday, it will only be to gratify my own conscience. Meanwhile, I’ll travel as long as I am physically, financially, and mentally able to make it happen and silence that conscience with rationalizations I won’t write here. But Athens is a place where the worst aspects of tourism are very evident and definitely affecting the lives of ordinary citizens.
It’s also a place where there are a lot of beautiful and awesome things at ancient sites you can’t see anywhere else in the world and I did see some. There are a whole lot of dirt paths and giant rocks and fragments of clay covered in ants out under the beating brutal sun. I’d stop in front of a sliver of an old column sitting lopsided on the ground and just think, “Okay…this is old. It’s so old. Like, wow. Another person stood here looking at it 3,000 years ago and now here you are, looking at this old thing. A rock cut into a shape that is so…so old.”
It’s funny how time awards meaning to places. I’m sure we’ve all seen that in our own environments. A building that wasn’t there when you were a kid, built in your teens, resented as new at first, and then a significant landmark by your thirties that you gaze at wistfully every time you visit home. I wonder if it bothered people when the Parthenon started going up on the Acropolis.
“Have you seen that thing they’re building on the hill? So annoying. It’s like we won’t be able to go anywhere in the city without it being right there, messing up the view.”
I did go to the Acropolis for the first and probably only time, and I did look like the worst kind of American tourist while doing it. I got some young people to take very unflattering photos of me and thus fulfilled the prophecy as it was foretold long ago during AP Art History in the 12th grade. There were a lot of temples and columns. I enjoyed winding my way up with this massive crowd, one of the ants being called steadily to the top of the peak. I also enjoyed the Temple of Athena Nike, which is on a much more human scale than the Parthenon. I get Athena. Just a total hard ass who goes through life solo and had such a petty jealousy problem she turned a girl into a spider.
It was nice to be alone, like Athena, to move fast and quick and get the last seat in the minimal shade of a cypress tree. It was nice to see some cats and nice to fill up my water bottle out of an old pipe. It was very nice to look out at the panoramic view instead of up at the buildings, absorbing the landscape of a place I’d only ever seen illuminated on a wall.
I thought, “You did it. You’re here. You are at the Acropolis. You’re in the pictures. You are so, so old.”
Then I made my way back down to find a place where people were talking, laughing, and alive.
I’ve been searching for a place to eat fried anchovies in NYC, if anyone has suggestions please message me immediately.
I’m sorry this post is late! It has felt very stupid to write this newsletter at times and I’m only on the 7th out of 39 posts, so it may happen again.
Randomly, while looking for stories about Athena I came across this trailer for Athena, a movie directed by Romain Gavras, who is Dua Lipa’s hot boyfriend. Takes place in a fictional Paris suburb that is hit by police violence. And now I’m gonna watch it.
As always, thanks for reading.
interesting perspective! i tend to feel guilty for NOT wanting to travel much. I don't know about fried anchovies but when I was in nyc this summer, little fried shrimp heads were trending. I was shocked.
Oh how I loved this one and relate to so much of it