The tiny town is like a Greek coin that has sunk into the bottom of the river shining under the last light of the afternoon. It represents nothing, except that it is lost. There is a date, but out of time, and with the condition of art, as worn, not aged, it has been made a beautiful object that governs exchange and wealth.
For the last few days, I remembered the pages that Claude Levi-Strauss wrote in The Savage Mind about the work of art as miniature. Reality works towards an actual scale, while art works towards a miniature (in French). Art is a synthetic form of the universe, a microcosm that reproduces the specificity of the world. The Greek coin is an entire model of an economy, of an entire civilization, but at times, only a lost object that shines in the late afternoon under the transparent water.
(The Last Reader [El Ultimo Lector], Ricardo Piglia, p.13)
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