sometimes there's so much beauty in the world...

“Now the horizon line was thickening and filling in with fantastic detail. We could see the pure spire of San Giorgio on the left, the lifted gold ball of the Dogana gleaming straight ahead of us and over on the right all the layered complication and panoply of the Riva degli Schiavoni, the church where Vivaldi was composer, the house where James finished Portrait of a Lady, the hotel where George Sand and Proust stayed, the Oriental filigree of the Doge's Palace, suspended over a low, columned walkway, the soaring monument topped by a saint and a crocodile, behind it the green-roofed ten-story brick campanile and, just to the right and beyond, the great clock with its two Moors striking the hours, both with bare asses and big dicks. And as the drone of our motors shifted softer, the hollow roar of thousands of milling human beings flowed in on us, the tumult of voices and shoes striking stone, the muffled busyness that suggested an undressed opera stage where a director was rehearsing a crowd scene with extras in street clothes. Guides with raised, colored umbrellas were trying to keep their different groups together (Joshua called them the pecore). Faintly, in the distance, an out-of-tune café orchestra was playing a palm-court verion of "Strangers in the Night."” Edmund White, The Farewell Trilogy.