Dear friends,

Once, I took a wheel throwing class. I was there for two hours and in all that time I didn’t make anything. I tried my best to mold the clay on the wheel into something that looked nice or, at the very least, would hold up in the kiln, but I walked away with no evidence of my having been there at all, except the impression of clay on my hands and under my fingernails, which lingered long after I left the studio.

They do these guided walking tours in Pompeii where you can walk around and imagine what used to be there before the eruption, drawing on some historian’s hallucination of the place, resurrecting a dead city, letting it appear before you like the door to the underworld before Orpheus, one world overlain onto another. Need we evidence for everything? Need we proof to remember that something happened?

Ghosts aren’t haunting enough these days.

Ever yours,

Sasha Rotko, EIC