You are right! I’ve read it and I did like it :) I really like books that feature complicated houses. (Mariam Petrosyan’s The House, In Which disappointed me in part because I felt like the house was actually not that relevant to the story… Let weird houses have agency!) I listened to Piranesi as an audiobook, which I almost never do, but I’m glad I did because all the Random Capitalisation in the print version would have annoyed me a little. The narrator had a calm voice and it was a peaceful story to listen to while destemming elderflowers and dandelions for jelly.
I remember making a post on my book blog last year saying Piranesi felt exactly like this artwork by Panji Andrian:
“I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burnt to the ground twice in this century.
“So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
“But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
“But it’s been burnt down?”
“Yes.”
“Twice?”
“Many times.”
“And rebuilt.”
“Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
“With completely new materials.”
“But of course. It was burnt down.”
“So how can it be the same building?”
“It is always the same building.”
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survived. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.”
I don’t think we talk enough about how, despite the presence of multiple globes, PotC takes place on a flat earth, ice wall included.
I’m gonna need some elaboration here
They literally sail over the edge of it after passing through a hole in a wall of ice. They fall off. They get back to the other side by passing through the whole ocean.
But also there’s a globe on, like, everyone’s desk.
See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.
Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World’s End with the death of the kraken:
Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world’s still the same. There’s just… less in it.
The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack’s compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma’s map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.
The pirates world isn’t flat, it’s round - but because the edge of the world exists in myth, it therefore exists in reality. The pirates are able to find it through supernatural means, but if, say, someone like Norrington just sailed in the same general direction, he wouldn’t end up in the same place.
“Pirate” is a mage subclass fueled by word of mouth, rule of cool, The Power of Belief/Love/Friendship, and rum.
« In a fully mechanized world there would be no more need to
carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc. […]. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry
stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would
even encroach upon the activities we now class as ‘art’; it is doing so
already […]. Mechanize the world as fully as it
might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine
cutting you off from the chance of working—that is, of living.
At a first glance this might not seem to matter. Why should you not
get on with your ‘creative work’ and disregard the machines that would do
it for you? But it is not so simple as it sounds. Here am I, working eight
hours a day in an insurance office; in my spare time I want to do something
'creative’, so I choose to do a bit of carpentering—to make myself a
table, for instance.
[…] But even when I get to work on
my table, it is not possible for me to feel towards it as the cabinet-maker
of a hundred years ago felt towards his table […]. For before I start, most of the work has already
been done for me by machinery. The tools I use demand the minimum of skill.
I can get, for instance, planes which will cut out any moulding; the
cabinet-maker of a hundred years ago would have had to do the work with
chisel and gouge, which demanded real skill of eye and hand. The boards I
buy are ready planed and the legs are ready turned by the lathe. I can even
go to the wood-shop and buy all the parts of the table ready-made and only
needing to be fitted together; my work being reduced to driving in a few
pegs and using a piece of sandpaper.
And if this is so at present, in the
mechanized future it will be enormously more so. With the tools and
materials available then, there will be no possibility of mistake, hence no
room for skill. Making a table will be easier and duller than peeling a potato. In such circumstances it is nonsense to talk of 'creative work’. In
any case the arts of the hand (which have got to be transmitted by
apprenticeship) would long since have disappeared. Some of them have
disappeared already, under the competition of the machine. Look round any
country churchyard and see whether you can find a decently-cut tombstone
later than 1820. The art, or rather the craft, of stonework has died out so
completely that it would take centuries to revive it.
The tendency of mechanical progress, then, is to frustrate the human need for effort and creation. It makes unnecessary and even impossible the
activities of the eye and the hand. There is really no reason why a human being should do more than
eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and procreate; everything else could be done
for him by machinery. […] The implied
objective of 'progress’ is—not exactly, perhaps, the brain in the
bottle, but at any rate some frightful subhuman depth of softness and
helplessness.
The sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense
unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay.
But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal to be said for it. The
machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it
rather as one accepts a drug—that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like
a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener
one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes. »
Anonymous
