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Essay
In my fourth-year high school German class,
the teacher decided
it wasn't enough just to learn a language. She wanted her students
to know something about the people and culture that employ it.
She assigned us to write a one-page theme about a specific
person or place. I remembered a color photograph in an art
history book from another class. It was a picture of the Kaisersall,
an 18th century palace ballroom. The floor is an oval chessboard
of shiny tiles, bordered by twenty carved marble columns spaced
around rose-gray walls. Between the various pillars
are wooden doors; a fireplace; tall, arched windows; paintings
and statues in wall niches. The teacher praised my description.
It was so real to her in its details, she wondered
if I had actually visited the hall. The vaulted ceiling, with its huge
glass chandeliers, is painted in white and pastels with gold filigree
flung from a Tilt-A-Whirl. Frescos top the dome with blue sky
that seems to release us into the open air. Flags wave, angels
and cherubs hover before sunlit clouds, warriors and gods
gaze thoughtfully upon us. Kings and queens conceal their bodies
in layers of ornate fabrics, even as Apollo proudly displays
his muscular bare chest. Forty years later, I've forgotten most
of my German. I remember that lavish ballroom only by revisiting
the art book colorplate. Its extravagance still grates against
my preference for the plain and simple. Forty years later
I remember that essay as an invitation to the palace
of the imagination. For an immature, inept kid who was
uncomfortable and ridiculed in the social world, it offered
the rich and vaulting universe where I have lived ever since.
© 2008 by Brian Powers |