From the Heath

When Jami and I honeymooned in London this January, one of our favorite days was spent in Hampstead. Hampstead is where Keats' home is (just across the street from the Heath), and it is a wonderful Victorian suburb. I felt like I was in Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday and that any moment we might be confronted by a gang of anarchist/policemen. The mud of the Heath is incredible, all gooey and black and off amazing depth and slickness. I don't recall encountering mud like that here in the States. The hillsides of the Heath are really vertical marshes. So we learned to stay on the beaten path. But when we reached the height of the Heath, there was a break in the trees, and we could see the lights of London. In the photo you might be able to make out Jami as she has hazarded to walk down the hill some ways, to get a better look. I wonder if one of those lights might be the Millennium wheel. We had thought of riding it, but being in a pod of clear glass as it slowly revolved up to and down from a great height was a not pleasant thought. Instead we sent to the British Film Institute theatre nearby on the south bank. There we saw two Bogart films Sahara (a war film about grace under pressure in the desert) and the Big Sleep (where Bogart and Bacall smoke up the screen). The Big Sleep needs to be seen on the big screen - I'd never seen it, except for an excerpt on TV. A large screen makes all the difference. Size is particular to any work's aesthetic. When I taught art history each image was reproduced in the same size, in the book and on the screen. When I went to a Picasso show here in Atlanta I encountered his early painting of a boy and his horse - it was enormous. I walked through the rest of the exhibition in a stupor. I could not get out of my head the effect of seeing a work that I was very familiar with in its actual size: I felt that I had never seen the work before.