LOS ANGELES — To question change in the state whose companies have transformed the world by networking it may seem like California dreaming. Lives last long enough now for the reality of change to be manifest. The world is not what it was when much of existence drifted by in a disconnected state and productivity had not taken a 24/7 hold.
Undistracted immersion in place and mood was easier back in the 20th century. That could make for great journalism. On the other hand, communication was harder. That could make filing the journalism a nightmare.
On the one hand, on the other: That’s life in any century. It’s lived in the gray zone of uncertainty. Delusional certainty tends to be the domain of those with ambitions to lead the muddled crowd. Politics depends on the promise of change. That’s its elixir.
But I’ve been wondering. The more things change, say the French, the more they stay the same. Or as a similar idea is put in “The Leopard,” one of the greatest of Italian novels: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”
They do change, sometimes with swift brutality. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia swept everything away — yet here is Vladimir Putin playing czar. Uprisings come and go but Egypt harkens for its pharaoh. We dreamed of paradise, lamented the leading East German protester of 1989 who would become Germany’s president, and woke up in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Scourges, from the plague to polio, are vanquished; others arise. The Medicis grow rich, become patrons of the arts, take a stab at just rule, before their inevitable fall; to be replaced in Florence-on-the-Pacific by the likes of Brin and Page and Omidyar and Thiel, who want to invest part of their dotcom fortunes in a more enlightened, healthier humanity.
The eternal puzzles of birth and love, death and beauty, injustice and poverty, persist. The search for happiness, and meaning, goes on. The same feelings exist in changed circumstances. Technology’s thrill may be no more than an ephemeral distraction from the immutable human condition, which constitutes the realm of art.
The catalyst to these musings was something I saw in Los Angeles, probably the last place I expected to see it because I think of the city as hot-wired to the new and inclined to the brittle. It was a bronze statue from the third century B.C. of a seated boxer, a life-size rendering of a bearded man who, to judge from the bruise on his cheek and his broken nose, has just emerged from a fight, or perhaps a series of fights. His body is strong, suggestive of the heroic, but his expression is excruciatingly human, full of stoicism and questioning.
Here I am, the boxer seems to say, and such is life: an unpredictable struggle for survival in which there is no escape from hard work and wisdom must be earned the hard way. You see, he murmurs across 2,300 years, I have done what I had to do and this is the state I find myself in: tired, battered but unflinching and alive.
The statue, found in Rome in 1885, is on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum, part of an astonishing exhibition called “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World.” Astonishing for its beauty but perhaps above all for the range of expression evident in the statuary. Gods of imposing power are depicted, yet it is the emotion of human subjects in all its variety — from serenity to suffering, from elation to exhaustion — that is most unforgettable because all those emotions are recognizable as, well, contemporary.
The boxer made me think of one of my favorite paintings, Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X in Rome’s Doria Pamphilj Gallery, not in any particular detail but in the evocation of someone who has lived life to the full: the ruddy and weathered face of the pontiff, the shrewd eyes, the expression that says he sees through the pomp of his position and is aware that life, even at the summit of power, may be viewed as a cruel joke. “Troppo vero!” — “Too true!” — the pope is said to have exclaimed on seeing it.
My late uncle, Bert Cohen, was in Italy during World War II. On July 21, 1944, he reached Monte Cassino and wrote in his war diary: “Poor Cassino, wreck and desolation unbelievable, roads smashed and pitted, mines, booby traps and graves everywhere. Huge shell holes, craters filled with stagnant slime, smashed buildings, hardly outlines remaining, a silent sight of ghosts and shadows. Pictures should be taken of this monument to mankind’s worst moments and circulated through every school room in the world.”
Along with pictures of the Hellenistic boxer and the Italian pope to illustrate the illusions of power, the bruises of life, the persistence of hope and the limits of change. Relax — we’ve been here before.
