In this chamber, one can almost hear reverberations of lost music. This oratorio, constructed in the seventeenth century, was designed according to the wishes of a reformer of the Church who envisioned an order in which the arts, especially music, might persuade ordinary people to follow its guiding principles of charity and love. Instead of an altar, an organ. Instead of priests, players. The oratorio was a chapel for the notes that rose toward the symbol of the trinity on its vault. Musicians strove toward the harmony of the counterpoint of the Baroque, the purity of a perfect fifth, the haunting of a minor third. Centuries passed, and the vision of the reformer spread to many countries; yet his disciples departed this space. Although the Sala stands, the music has vanished. In the center of this bustling city, the hall is filled with pure silence, awaiting renovation. Long, metal ties hold the walls to one another; perhaps otherwise the echoes of the past would shake them apart. Time has silenced the music, not its ghost.
-Lan Samantha Chang
In the old heart, two ventricles and one atrium still pump blood into the city. Broken by seismic palpitations, then stripped and neglected, the brick cells have been patched, stitched with wires, propped with metal stents. Other organs of this ancient core were also rehabilitated so that the past can tell a more robust story in the present. The seat where the emperor ruled over legal wrangles still resides in the atrium, and even presided over the wrestling matches of one modern summer games. Every year now an international festival grapples with the bodies of literature.
Not too far above, the remnants of two hemispheres mark the library and auditoriums that collected the minds who studied, taught, orated in public. No longer the cortex of intellect and culture, the fragments are obscured behind a shrouded fence, approached along a fiber fraying off the spine. The almost forgotten hemispheres need the descriptive white plaques dotting the neural strand to aid them, and the few wanderers who stray there, to remember in the present their relevance in the past. The electricity that had livened this cerebrum has scattered, some of it to the heart.
What can a fading memory tell about the parts that were lost, destroyed, silenced? Only an amputated story, missing an arm, a leg, nose, throat. But can a reconstructed heart with an altered anatomy tell a more expansive, more encompassing story? Possibly, when, in addition to the mind, it can also function as the lungs. The stories told there each year, the words spoken there, could be its air, its breath. Inhaled. Circulated. Absorbed. Exhaled into the city.
-Judy Chung
At the entrance to the institute, an apotropaic mosaic Medusa gazes up from the hallway floor. She protects the library by warding off evil influences, turning them to stone. Several poets in the library's collection have fantasized about turning to stone, or turning their beloved to stone. Visitors may read these poems under the aegis of the gorgoneion. "I have built a monument more lasting than bronze / and set higher than the pyramids of kings," Horace writes in "Ode 3.30." "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme," Shakespeare writes in "Sonnet 55," "But you shall shine more bright in these contents / Than unswept stone." The classical project of literature is to defeat death by fashioning a superior stature. Books are just sculptures that don't erode: they extend mortal forms across immortal time, preserving impermanent pasts for an infinite future. Yesterday survives as a pebble in tomorrow's boot. Medusa may be viewed as the patron saint of this immortality project. Like a poet, she regards people from the point of view of petrification. To see her is to be stratified, eternalized. That is why a gorgon guards the archive. Within this library, whose manuscripts have survived for centuries, she surveys all visitors with tesserae eyes. Everything here, she seems to say, will endure like stone. That is the promise the Medusa makes: has been making, decade after decade, with her undecaying mosaic face. The evil she is warding off is time.
-Bennett Sims
