Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Rocky road to fame..


You have to marvel at the sheer emotional impact of this picture. It's a man in his mid-30s who was killed (obviously) by means of a bloody great boulder flung at his head by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Examination of his leg bones (because there's nothing left of his head!) show that, although he survived the initial eruption itself, he would have had great difficulty running from the pyroclastic flows and debris raining down on the town (Pompeii) and met his end in this cataclysmic event so long ago. 

We can't help but feel for him, we can't help but wonder what he was thinking, seeing and experiencing and how the preservation of his remains combined with the blatant evidence of his sheer bad-luck married with the fragility of existence somehow link us via shared Human insecurities across a vast swathe of time. One thing is for sure, he could not have imagined how his demise would be shared around the world some 2000 years later, or (from his perspective) the magical devices that we all use to consume his dramatic final resting place, on the other hand I bet he'd understand perfectly how we all feel looking at him.

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