La febbre dell'oro

I have an etching of the Piazza di Campo dei Fiori from the 20s, a gift from Ambassador Kellogg of chilly Minneapolis to my maternal grandmother, on her second marriage. I'm very glad he didn't wait for her third, which never took place, because I like this little thing very much. At its center, a banner is inscribed with the title for this entry, a happy indication of the times. It's a pleasing augmentation of my sense of consanguinity with a woman I never met. As I study her dissolving germanic beauty in a desk-sized silver frame, engraved Dorothea by her mother who survived her, I feel a dialogue with sweetness and with humour in her pictures, and yes, a little bravery. I search for their descent.

A relief from many things, humour is assuredly the best defense against beauty, as anyone who listens to Mozart will tell you better than I. To urge laughter is to suppress it, to elicit its labial predicate is divine. One has to see this portrait as a field of flowers or it would seem to defy contemplation without a smile. It is almost pitiably floral in an incontestably vibrant, nearly lurid blaze; yet how it reeks of flashing glory in a readiness to play. This rude, unpresentable and garish garden is the oft-contested ground of Homer's Iliad, and invites the gaze to gauge what's here to save. To me, the screening of La Febbre dell'Oro in this piazza, like the Italian translation of the title, goes to the heart of the vulnerability in this image.

The Gold Rush is a snow flick - by definition, our ultimate snow flick. Where the drifts in which the spirit of these times would only sink so readily, and in the name of entertainment if that can be believed, Chaplin disports in the nearest available bed of fallibility. Winter's tracklessness is his screen for hilarity, the tramp's own constant flux. His snow will offer scale to his humanity. If one has the wit to read the Iliad as a poem both of love, and - as Simone Weil so brilliantly did - of force, these facets give a choice of how to live. How brilliant the difference, between our age of stentorian virtuosity, and the buoyant smile within the silver frame.

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