As an armchair Egyptologist, I'm super excited that archaeologists may have found the mausoleum where Antony and Cleopatra spent their final hours together. Why? What accounts for my own fascination? Perhaps it's because although my own imagination can - and does - conjure images of such a dramatic scene, I know that those images would be a lot less blurry with the help of some physical evidence. It reminds me of how excited I was to see the first Harry Potter film, to see the characters I loved in my head come to life outside of it. I was also deeply curious to see how different Harry and his gang, and Hogwarts, would look from how I imagined them - I always relish conversations that start with, 'if you were casting this book as a film, who would you choose for...'?
But while seeing the place where it all happened can make the story come alive, I know I've experienced a strange sense of anticlimax in the past when I've been to historical sites - for instance, Bulgakov's house in Kyiv this past summer. It might be because when I'm actually confronted with these places, I realize all too well that they're devoid of the lives lived in them. The relics are there, the souvenirs of life, but the energy, the passion, the fear are things now merely suggested and symbolized. Historical sites at times feel like shells or like frameworks, waiting for us to come along and project our own visions onto them. But I wonder, if we all compared the images in our own heads, how many different narratives of the same event - how many different details - could we come up with?
But in spite of all this, I admit I'm desperate - show us pictures!!!
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