Lateness

The Coal Cart, New York, by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1911)

Sontag. The Cavaliere (William Hamilton, British envoy to Naples) in Pompeii:

. . . it would have been he who had recalled the line from the Aeneid the excavators found that someone had written on the wall of his house: Conticuere omn . . . (“All fell silent”). Gasping for breath, he had not lived to finish it.

And:

He was waiting for catastrophe. This is the corruption of deep melancholy, that its sense of helplessness reaches out to include others, that it so easily imagines (and therefore wills) a more general calamity.
        . . . Every visitor wanted the volcano to explode, to “do something.” They wanted their ration of apocalypse.

(See Bernadette Mayer, in “On Sleep”: “I worry about why the masses sort of love disasters”)

And, the Cavaliere’s “savory discovery of traces of an ancient priapic cult still existing under the cover of Christianity”:

There he was taken to a festival in a nearby village honoring Saints Cosmas and Damian which culminated in a church service to bless a foot-long object, much revered by barren women, known as the Great Toe.

The Last Days of Pompeii, by Karl Briullov (1833)

Learn’d that my hero-auspice and adversary Pliny the Elder “succumbed to the noxious smoke” of Vesuvius, researching no doubt.

And that the philosopher Empedoclus “jumped into the boiling crater [at Etna] to test whether he was immortal.”

And that Goethe got snooty, bestaked himself high above the frivolity, at social gatherings chez the Cavaliere. No monkey he.