Paperback.

This is an essay about the uneasiness inherent in culture. It is about sex and death. It is about art. It is about iconoclasm. It is about Ruskin. It is about Venice. It is about places and their modulation in memory: the marble quarry on Iona, the battlefield of Culloden, Freud’s study, astrological murals in Padua, Iceland, Japan. It touches on thinkers, both verbal and visual. It is about  the nature of space and time. It is about things seen. It is about a fluctuation from nothing. It is about the paintings of Turner and Claude. It is about libraries burned out and remade. It is about translations. It is about empire. It is about Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. It is about denial. It is about the dust of the rose petal. It is about the absorption of light. It is about Eros and Kali. It is about museums and echoes.