Read Online The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag - Free Book Online Page B

all.
    Someone was knocking. Perhaps it was Valerio.
    I promise we will speak about it next time, she was saying. (The fear? The volcano?) She will talk with her son who has climbed the volcano since he was a child and knows its secrets.
    The Cavaliere did not understand whom she was talking about. But deciding he had wasted enough time on this evasive display of the clairvoyant’s powers, he reached into his purse to put some money on the table. Efrosina stopped him with an imperious gesture, declaring that the honor of His Excellency’s visit was payment enough and that it was she who wished to present him with a gift, and directed Tolo or was it Barto—what did she call the one-eyed boy?—to accompany the Cavaliere and his servant home.
    *   *   *
    The Cavaliere thought of himself as—no, was—an envoy of decorum and reason. (Isn’t that what the study of ancient art teaches us?) Besides a most profitable investment and the exercise of his collecting lust, there was a moral in these stones, these shards, these dimmed objects of marble and silver and glass: models of perfection and harmony. The antiquity that was uncouth, alert to the demonic, was largely hidden from these early patrons of antiquity. What he overlooked in antiquity, what he was not prepared to see, he cherished in the volcano: the uncouth holes and hollows, dark grottoes, clefts and precipices and cataracts, pits within pits, rocks under rocks—the rubbish and the violence, the danger, the imperfection.
    Few ever see what is not already inside their heads. The Cavaliere’s great predecessor of a century earlier in the love of volcanoes, Athanasius Kircher, had watched Etna and Vesuvius in action and had himself lowered by a pulley into their craters. But these bold close-up observations, undertaken at such risk and with so much discomfort (how his eyes must have stung from the fumes, how his torso must have ached from the ropes), did not deter the wily Jesuit from proposing a wholly imagined account of the volcano’s insides. The pictures illustrating his Mundus Subterraneus show Vesuvius, in cross section, as a hollow shell enclosing another world, furnished with sky, trees, mountains, valleys, caverns, rivers of water as well as of fire.
    The Cavaliere wondered if he dared try a descent into the volcano, while it still remained quiet. Of course, he no more envisaged that he would find Kircher’s netherworld than he thought the volcano was the mouth of hell or that an eruption, like a famine, was a divine chastisement. He was a rational person, afloat in a sea of superstition. A connoisseur of ruins, like his friend Piranesi in Rome, for what was the mountain if not a great ruin? A ruin which could come alive and cause further ruin.
    In the plates he commissioned to illustrate the two folio volumes he had made recently of his “volcanic letters” to the Royal Society, the Cavaliere appears in some of the pictures, on foot or on horseback. In one he is watching his groom bathe in Lake Avernus; in another—a memorable occasion—escorting the royal party to the brink of a chasm into which the lava was coursing. A snowy landscape, in which the mountain looks particularly serene, has no observer, but most pictures that show the odd shapes and mutations produced by volcanic activity have some human figures: a spectacle requires the depiction of a gaze. Erupting is its nature, the nature of a volcano, even if it does so only now and then. That would be the picture … if you choose to have only one.
    As Vesuvius neared another eruption, the Cavaliere climbed more often, partly to taste how fearless he had become. Was it the sibyl’s prediction of a long life? Sometimes he felt safer making his way up the seething mountain than anywhere else.
    The mountain provided a different experience from anything else, a different measure. The land has spread, the sky has grown, the gulf has