terminal 0
unfinished
"Man is the measure of all things." I remember when I wrote that, when I first came here, the smell of the crypts, the silence. The silence is the same, but the smell seems less powerful... perhaps I am growing less sensitive with age. Perhaps the corpses, too, have grown older, dustier... probably both.
...those long nights. The priests must have thought me mad. They still do, of course, but my having Cesare Borgia as patron certainly made them more polite... my work took me inside these dead bodies, like a surveyor on a new continent. The contour and border of muscle, tendon, and skeleton...how much I learned! Of course, now when I look at a living body, I gain just as much...still, a new study must be made from time to time, as with the old man in Santa Maria Nuova in Florence...but still the body is from where all proportion comes, the golden ratio...
...but now I question that perfection. Is Man the measure of all things? I saw the shadowy figure here again, deep within the crypt. It is a good thing that I was familiar with the shadow before seeing it here, or I would have been certain that it was the ghost of one of my 'models'... ...what the disembodied shadow has shown me is that the perfection of ratio I see in the human body is only the chance result of one method of describing proportion...that there are other ways of counting, other mathematics which encompass perfections far beyond that of the human body...
Again I ask, is it that I am growing frail? Do I no longer see the body as perfect because my own body is so bent with age? I am hiding this manuscript deep in this crypt. I only hope that the priests of this place...do not remove it down to deeper levels, where (I have heard) they practice rites that have little to do with Christianity. What I would not give to meet an honest priest. Then, perhaps, I could discuss the nature of the visitor that has been haunting me...angelic, perhaps? Or otherwise?
success
"Man is the measure of all things." I remember when I wrote that, when I first came here, the smell of the crypts, the silence. The silence is the same, but the smell seems less powerful... perhaps I am growing less sensitive with age. Perhaps the corpses, too, have grown older, dustier... probably both.
...those long nights. The priests must have thought me mad. They still do, of course, but my having Cesare Borgia as patron certainly made them more polite... my work took me inside these dead bodies, like a surveyor on a new continent. The contour and border of muscle, tendon, and skeleton...how much I learned! Of course, now when I look at a living body, I gain just as much...still, a new study must be made from time to time, as with the old man in Santa Maria Nuova in Florence...but still the body is from where all proportion comes, the golden ratio...
...but now I question that perfection. Is Man the measure of all things? I saw the shadowy figure here again, deep within the crypt. It is a good thing that I was familiar with the shadow before seeing it here, or I would have been certain that it was the ghost of one of my 'models'... ...what the disembodied shadow has shown me is that the perfection of ratio I see in the human body is only the chance result of one method of describing proportion...that there are other ways of counting, other mathematics which encompass perfections far beyond that of the human body...
Again I ask, is it that I am growing frail? Do I no longer see the body as perfect because my own body is so bent with age? I am hiding this manuscript deep in this crypt. I only hope that the priests of this place...do not remove it down to deeper levels, where (I have heard) they practice rites that have little to do with Christianity. What I would not give to meet an honest priest. Then, perhaps, I could discuss the nature of the visitor that has been haunting me...angelic, perhaps? Or otherwise?