n winter you wake up in this city, especially on Sundays , to the chiming ofits innumerable bells, as though behind your gauze curtains a gigantic china teaset were vibrating on a silver tray in the pearl-gray sky. You fling the window open and the room isinstantly flooded with this outer, peal-laden haze, which is part damp oxygen, part coffee and prayers. No matter what sort of pills, and how many, you've got to swallow this morning, you feel it's not over for you yet. No matter, by the same token, how autonomous you are, how niuch you've been betrayed, how thorough and dispiriting is your self- knowledge, you assume there is still hope for you, or at least a future. (Hope, said Francis Bacon, is a good breakfast but a bad supper.) This optimism derives from the haze, from the prayer part of it, especially if it is time for breakfast. On days like this, the city indeed acquires a porcelain aspect, what with all its zinc-covered cupolas resembling teapots or upturned cups, and the tilted profile ofcanipaniles clinking like abandoned spoons and melting in the sky. Not to mention the seagulls and pigeons, now sharpening into focus, now melting into air. I should say that, good though this place is for honeymoons, I've often thought it should be tried for divorces also—both in progress and already accomplished. There is no better backdrop for rapture to fade into; whether right or wrong, no egoist can star for long in this porcelain setting by crystal water, for it steals the show. I am aware, of course, ofthe disastrous consequence the above suggestions may have for hotel rates here, even in winter. Still, people love their melodrama more than architecture, and I don't feel threatened. It is surprising that beauty is valued less than psychology, but so long as such is the case, I'll be able to afford this city—which means till the end ofmy days, and which ushers in the generous notion of the future.
ne is what one looks at—well, at least partially. The medieval belief that a pregnant woman wishing her child to be beautiful must look at beautiful objects is not so nai've given the quality of dreams one dreams in this city. Nights here are low on nightmares—judging of course by literary sources (especially since nightmares are such sources' main fare). Wherever he goes, a sick man, for example—a cardiac cripple particularly—is bound to wake up now and then at three o'clock in the morning in a state ofsheer terror, thinking he's going. Yet nothing of the sort, I must report, ever happened to nie here; though as I write this, I keep my fingers and toes crossed.
There are better ways, no doubt, to manipulate dreams, and no doubt a good case can be made for it being best done gastrononiically. Yet by Italian standards, the local diet is not exceptional enough to account for this city's concentration ofindeed dreamlike beauty in its faqades alone. For in dreams, as the poet said, begin responsibilities. In any case, some of the blueprints—an apt terni in this city!—certainly sprang from that source, as there is nothing else one can trace them to in reality.
Should a poet mean to say siniply, "In bed," that would hold, too. Architecture is surely the least carnal of Muses, since the rectangular principle of a building, of its faqade in particular, militates—and often sharply so—against your analyst's interpretation of its cloud- or wave-like—rather than feminine!—cornices, loggias, and whatnot. A blueprint, in short, is always more lucid than its analysis. Yet many a frontone here reminds you precisely of a headboard looming above its habitually unmade bed, be it morning or evening. They are far more absorbing, these headboards, than those beds' possible contents, than the anatomy of your beloved, whose only advantage here could be agility or warmth .
Ifthere is anything erotic to those blueprints' marble consequences, it is the sensation caused by the eye trained on any of them—the sensation similar to that of the fingertips touching for the first time your beloved's breast or, better yet, shoulder. It is the telescopic sensation of coming in contact with the cellular infinity of another body's existence—a sensation known as tenderness and proportionate perhaps only to the number of cells that body contains. (Everyone would understand this, save Freudians, or Muslims believing in the veil. But then again, that may explain why among Muslims there are so many astronomers. Besides, the veil is a great social planning device, since it ensures every female a man regardless of her appearance. Worst come to worst, it guarantees that the first- night shock is at least niutual. Still, for all the Oriental motifs in Venetian architecture, Muslims in this city are the most infrequent visitors.) In any case, whichever comes first—realitv or dream—one's notion of afterlife in this city appears to be well taken care of by its clearly paradisaical visual texture. Sickness alone, no matter how grave it may be, won't avail vou here of an infernal vision. You'd need an cxtraordinarv neurosis, or a comparable accumulation of sins, or both, to fall prey to nightmares on these premises.
That's possible, of course, but not too frequent. For the niild cases of either, a sojourn here is the best therapy, and that's what tourism, locally, is all about. One sleeps tight in this city, since one's feet get too tired quelling a worked-up psyche or guilty conscience alike.
erhaps the best proof of the Almighty's existence is that we never know when we are to die. In other words, had life been a solely human affair, one would be issued at birth with a term, or a sentence, stating precisely the duration of one's presence here: the way it is done in prison camps. That this doesn't happen suggests that the affair is not entirely human; that something we've got no idea or control of interferes. That there is an agency which is not subject to our chronology or, for that matter, our sense of virtue. Hence all these attempts to foretell or figure out one's future, hence one's reliance on physicians and gypsies, \vhich intensifies once \ve are ill or in trouble, and \vhich is but an attempt at domesticating—or demonizing—the divine. The same applies to our sentiment for beauty, natural and man-made alike, since the infinite can be appreciated only by the finite. Except for grace, the reasons for reciprocity \vould be unfathomable—unless one truly seeks a benevolent explanation of \vhy they charge you so niuch for everything in this city.