The crew of a North American space ship explores a martian city. The city is empty and intact. Rooms seems to have been just abandoned, and the presence of the departed is still strong with a painting here, a library there, a mosaic in the next house. Martians died abruptly and masively of smallpox. Few are still alive, but have abandoned their doomed cities and live scattered in far away hills. The astronauts do not even begin to understand the catastrophe they have brought on, that is left to us readers. What they are is relieved after the long months in a space ship, after realizing that they will survive, that no unknown alien can oppose them. So they tour the abandoned cities. The young earthlings eventually get drunk and puke and make bad jokes and a camp fire with books they can’t understand, and destroy some buildings, and some sculptures, like adolescents left loose in ancient ruins.
In Pompeii, interspersed in streets of delicate proportions and elegant lines, there are garbage containers for us visitors. They have posters attached, with the slogan “the barbarian doesn’t care”. So we are nudged to be civilized and use the trash bins.
Bradbury describes the martian cities as elegant and delicate, daughters of a culture that never splitted science and art, a civilization where beauty could be synonym of true. I am not that much of a visual person, so I remember Bradbury’s description, but I had no image. Now I do, remembering my few days in Naples, and Pompeii. The split between knowledge and estethics was young in the times were Pompeii was build and inhabited. I would like to believe that the powerful merchants and politicians of Pompeii, the ones that have left their houses for us to see, understood that the beauty of their mosaics and frescos were intrinsic part of their knowledge of people and nature.
We believe that Plato wrote the Phaedrus about 400 years before Pompeii was buried by the Vesuvius. I would like to believe then that the long history of the city predates the Platonic dialogue. In it, Socrates warns young Phaedrus of the hubris of pursuing beauty without a rational. We know well how successful this plea turned out to be. Our rationality, our science, left our art behind, and so we have created buildings of immense ugliness, welfare anchored in the suffering of whatever nature is. In Pompeii I saw the ample and yet delicate spaces, the open atriums and the well lighted baths, the mosaics with fishes and octopuses and eels ruled by figures half human and half animal and like to believe that the split had not yet won, that the inhabitants of Pompeii still had some of the Bradurian dream, that the link between beauty and knowledge was alive, that humans were not that far away from nature, not yet.
In Pompeii, some two thousand years ago.