Ancient temples are spare, even the relatively intact ones, lacking color and context. Their bones are, for this reason, articulate. Yes, they actually do dance, although without moving. I love the curve of the columns. And I love the rows of columns still standing or restored, the gaps between pieces in the shaft completed with cement, so alien to the consistency of stone. Look at the columns at Priene, standing erect like a band of meerkats, all alert to the same unheard sound and all non-collectively responsive to each other. There is no sense of a narrative. Only the repetition, without redundancy, of beauty and fulfillment.

The intact temple seems to say: "I am. I was young. I will be indistinguishable from the stone I came from." I wonder if they spoke the same in their heyday but that the words were lost in the clamor. Especially when you can see through to the other side -- the sky, a village off in the distance, a peak looming; their assertion of duration is pilferated by acknowledgment and acceptance. Hera and Athena and Apollo have become a Zen garden and cultures pranam.

The theater. At first it was the silence between Greek sounds. O. Koinon. Autadelphon. Then the silence in the orchestra when the play is done and the actors and the audience have gone home. Now it's the silence between millennia: longer, larger, louder. But it's the same silence.