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Feb 3, 2023·edited Feb 3, 2023Liked by Eve Tushnet

Realized that perhaps I enjoyed Piranesi so much not just because it made gratitude such a living, accessible thing--we spend enough time in Piranesi's journals to feel like we can walk around inside his head, we can predict how he might react to something, we can think about shifting our reactions to look more like his--but because it is a portrait of Christian virtue in a Christless context. I don't know whether it's a personality defect or a hangover from post-Christian civilization, but traditional depictions of Christian piety rarely inspire me with the kind of immediacy that Piranesi did. In Piranesi gratitude is attractive, even though we know it was abused. Gratitude, humility, and intelligence all coexist very comfortably in Piranesi.

SPOILER

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A scene that stuck out to me was when the policewoman explains to Piranesi that the dead were likely murdered, and how uncomfortable this makes him. I don't have the book in front of me, but there was a line about him wanting to back to thinking of them as peaceful and noble. I think there's a sense in which the kind of radical gratitude with which Piranesi sees the world can feel like it papers over suffering and cruelty. The book doesn't tell us what to do about that, but it did acknowledge the tension. (If I am a Beloved Child of the House...what were they?) EDIT: Of course, Piranesi also doesn't see death as a thing that renders a person unlovable, or even unable to receive love.

Last point: Piranesi is able to lavish everything in his world with such love and attention because it is small. As a mostly SAHM I chafe with the smallness of my world pretty often, but Piranesi is a wonderful portrait of how constraint can actually heighten our attention and care, if we allow it (or we can sleep under the stairs eating crisps). I think human minds were not meant to be aware of the vastness of humanity and the world, I think it's probably corrosive. Here I am on the internet regardless, of course. Suffering doesn't require a lot of effort to be noticed, beauty does. The scale of the world we're supposed to casually hold in our minds has a bias.

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