Sicilian Odyssey

by Francine Prose

  And then, as it happened, I found myself thinking of the “Ephebus of Mozia,” the statue of the young man that I saw in the Whitaker Museum, on the nearly deserted island off the coast between Trapani and Marsala. I pictured it with utter clarity—its grace, its beauty, the way it seems lighted from within—and it struck me that whoever had carved it in the fifth century B.C. had done so either during a period of strife or unrest, or in a brief spell of peace between two outbreaks of violence. And yet the statue had been made, and war had indeed broken out, and the sculpture had been buried, and saved, and unearthed, and recognized as the masterpiece that it is. As I imagined it, radiant and tranquil, in its room in the museum, the very fact of its existence seemed like evidence, like a sign of what Sicily has to tell us if we are willing to listen: that it is necessary to operate on faith and to believe that what we do will, like the beautiful “Young Man of Mozia,” survive and endure.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Francine Prose is the author of ten novels, including Bigfoot Dreams, Primitive People, and Blue Angel, a National Book Award finalist in 2000, and the recent nonfiction work The Lives of the Muses. Her short fiction, which has appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, has been gathered in two collections, Women and Children First and The Peaceable Kingdom. Prose is also a prolific essayist; her pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s (where she is a contributing editor), Elle, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, and a PEN translation prize. She lives in New York City.

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  ANNA QUINDLEN on London

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  BARRY UNSWORTH on Crete

  GEOFFREY WOLFF on Maine

  PAUL WATKINS on Norway

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  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DIRECTIONS

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