sicko | masqué

Sometimes you come across a single sentence that makes you lay down a book and ponder the words for a day or more. It is in Andrew Miller's "Ingenious Pain" where the Reverend leaves the site of a post-mortem examination and looks at the landscape.

It serves him like the little painted screens Italian priests are said to hold before the eyes of condemned men to hide the approaching scaffold.

What must those screens have looked like? A Venetian cityscape, or a pastoral scene? Maybe one could even request a favourite work of art on the way to the executioner's workshop. A blinker as a final feast for the eyes.

Not much later I came across Project Facade, that features the reverse blinker: tin masks as facial prostetics for horribly wounded soldiers from the Great War.

At times one can only experience humanity by being presented a mask.