Today, while touring Casa Loma, the magnificent neo-gothic estate of Sir Henry Pellatt, in the upscale DuPont neighborhood of Toronto, I found myself staring into a beautifully appointed room in the Adams style: soft colors, elaborate plaster works, and, in this particular room, representations drawn from the decor common in the Roman city of Pompeii, displayed in a Romantic style that had more than a little of the feel of antediluvian Atlantis to it, the tragic lost paradise. I found that it turned my stomach.
Yesterday I attended the Pompeii exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum. It was quite an exhibit. Coins, sculpture, pottery, and reliefs from the excavation sight were all on display. In the final stage of the exhibit you walk through a room with a video projection of an erupting mountain, as the wall beside you shows the fast accumulation of ash from the moment of the eruption towards a mortal event horizon, the moment when escape from the city would have been totally impossible. At the end of this hallway there is a sharp left hand turn and there, in front of you, are nineteen plaster figures, cast by archaeologists from the indentations left in the solidified ash after their corpses had decomposed. They were bracing to see, like a slap or a harsh word spoken by a trusted friend. The final positions of their bodies told you something of their lives: a lone man drawn up on himself in a pugalist pose, locked in place when the extreme heat involuntarily contracted his tendons; a bag of gold coins was found beside him--the wealth he tried to bring with him from the death of the city, an adult and child bound together in an embrace who likely died in a sleepy suffocation beneath the weight of the ash and stone, a man who would have stood at least six and half feet high, a giant compared to the others whose body was sprawled as if he had tripped at a dead sprint never to rise, a guard dog who died tied up outside of a wealthy home. The corpses reflect harshly on the quote from the first book of The Aeneid, where Virgil writes that the Romans were "masters of the Earth."
Walking among these death casts, I was struck by a detail that had never occurred to me before. One of the placards, near a bronze lamp, suggested that the darkness cast by the volcanic cloud (which had hung, ominous in the sky for hours before people began to die) meant that in the last hours of Pompeii the city would have been lit by lamps in the middle of the day. There is something in the thought of that normal gesture, the quick and mechanical trimming of wick and lighting of lamp, that stands out in the face of impending death, a habitual gesture made grotesque by circumstance.
Later, in an exhibit of gemstones and minerals, brilliant stones and dazzling crystal configurations of almost unspeakable wonder. I was struck by the degree to which the impersonal horror or the mountain was a manifestation of the same geological forces that forged, through unimaginable heat and pressure, the fabulous minerals in front of me. I thought about those stones again today in Casa Loma, the attempt of a man who, at his apex was said to control 1/4 of the total wealth of Canada, who built for himself a palace of stone, was ruined, and died penniless, living in the bungalow (garage) of the man who had been his chauffeur, and how he had thought to decorate his palace in images of Pompeii, never imagining that an impersonal power beyond his control would one day ruin him too. Which is too bad. One wonders if perhaps such a thought might not have saved him, at least to the extent that anyone can be saved from such things.
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